nmiliUHmlltt lUIHInHmllHIIillilltHnnilHlH HlllHI i illllH HII H 



RECREATIONS OF 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



QDQlBTbfifiEa 



£d 




Class f S t rit 
Book_ JEji_ 



Gopyiightl^^ 



i oj ^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSnV 



Recreations of 
an Anthologist 

By 

BRANDER MATTHEWS 



Author of "Ballads of Books," 
"American Familiar Verse, "etc. 




NEWYORKs 2; x.s: 

DODD, MEAD i^f COMPANY 

=: X X X 2:1904 



TWO Oopies Rficeiveo 

AUG 30 1904 

Cooyrteht Enm 

CUASS «- XXo. No. 

<? i, / o o 

COPY B 






Copyright, 1896, 1899, 1901, 1904, by 
DoDD, Mead and Company 

Copyright, 1903, 1904, by 
Charles Scribner's Sons 

Copyright, 1903, 1904, by 
Harper & Brothers 



Published September, 1904 



CONTENTS 

I By Way of Introduction i 

II A Theme, with Variations 13 

III Unwritten Books 37 

IV Seed-Corn for Stories 50 
V American Satires in Verse 69 

VI American Epigrams 103 

VII A Note on the Quatrain 130 

VIII Carols of Cookery 147 

IX Recipes in Rhyme 164 

X The Uncollected Poems of H. C. Bun- 

NER 186 
XI The Strangest Feat of Modern Magic 209 



RECREATIONS OF AN 
ANTHOLOGIST 



BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 

PRYING eyes all over the world 
are now seeking to spy out the 
secret motives of every human 
action and to find an explana- 
tion, more or less plausible, for all the 
freakish deeds and foolish misdeeds of 
mankind. But no one of these inquirers 
into the recesses of man's being has yet 
come forward with a wholly satisfactory 
explanation of the reasons which lead so 
many of us to find our chief pleasure in 
the seemingly idle pastime of "making a 
collection," as it is called. Why is it that 
many a man puts his whole heart in this 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

gathering together of the objects of his 
seeking? There are not a few otherwise 
sensible beings, good citizens, voters, 
church-members, who act on the axiom that 
the chief end of man is to "make a collec- 
tion," — whether of books or of auto- 
graphs, of fans or of playing cards, of 
postage-stamps or of pictorial posters, of 
coins or of counterfeit money. 

Of course, there Is no denying that any 
collection, a string of buttons or a shelfful 
of boot-heels has some scientific value; and 
more than once has the mere heaper up of 
unconsidered trifles rendered Inestimable 
service to the avid investigator Into the 
records of human endeavor. The acquisi- 
tive energy of the coin-collectors has led to 
the lighting up of many a dark spot In 
chronology; and the accumulative zeal of 
the autograph-collectors has preserved writ- 
ings which have helped to elucidate many 
a doubtful point In history. Even a collec- 
tion of the buttons of precocious poets or a 
gathering of the boot-heels of famous 



BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 

female authors might supply suggestive 
material to an inquisitive critic like Saint- 
Beuve, who was forever striving to inter- 
pret the works of every writer by a pains- 
taking analysis of all the petty facts of his 
or her personality. 

But however much the collector may 
boast of the utility of his labors, he knows 
perfectly well that his motive is not utili- 
tarian. If he is honest with himself, he 
will admit humbly that the attraction of 
"making a collection" does not lie in the 
ultimate value of the collection when it 
shall be completed (as far as that may be 
possible). In the immense majority of 
cases the beginnings of the collection were 
accidental and wholly devoid of purpose. 
Sometimes as the collection grew, the col- 
lector has become conscious of its possible 
importance to science; but the charm of 
collecting is wholly independent of the 
actual value of the things accumulated. 
Indeed, the collection seems to lose some of 
its interest the nearer it approaches to com- 
3 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

pletion; and it is then increasingly in danger 
of being disposed of hastily by auction, by 
private sale or by donation to some 
museum, so that the former owner may be 
set free to start again on the joyful labor he 
delights in. The zest of the sport resides in 
the pursuit of the game, and not in the 
counting of the spoils of the chase. "To 
have and to hold" is not the collector's 
motto but "to seek and to find." 

It is this accumulation that gives the col- 
lector his keenest pleasure, this adding 
together of specimen after specimen, with 
little thought as to the importance to any 
investigator of the material thus amassed. 
The collector is not conscious of any 
altruistic wish to help along some unknown 
scientific observer. On the contrary, it is 
for himself he is working; he is frankly 
selfish, — not to say greedy. He is on the 
alert for the objects of his desire, he is 
capturing them, storing them up one by 
one, setting them up over against each 
other, solely for his own enjoyment, to 

4 



BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 

satisfy some inner need of his own soul. 
And this is why the true collector is 
almost as likely to be miserly as he is 
to be liberal. Now and then there is a 
collector of books or of coins who is 
notorious for the pitiful delight he takes 
in denying all access to his treasures, over 
which he prefers to gloat in contemptible 
solitude. The spring which moves these 
meaner collectors is probably a primitive 
instinct for acquisition; it is a belated sur- 
vival of an ancestral trait, useful enough, 
once upon a time, to that remote progenitor 
of ours who was Probably Arboreal and 
who needed to lay up stores of all sorts 
against the coming of winter. And in the 
pleasure the collector takes in arranging 
and in re-arranging the things he has 
brought together with an infinitude of 
effort, perhaps we ought to recognize a 
cropping-out of that other rudimentary in- 
stinct which is known as the play-impulse. 
But here, as elsewhere in the long story of 
the ascent of man, we can see a constant 
5 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

struggle upward. That which begins be- 
cause of the brute instinct of acquisition, a 
wanton accumulation without regard to the 
value of the things heaped up or to the 
utility of the collection itself, is evolved in 
time into something higher; and those who 
begin by collecting buttons or boot-heels 
may develop at last into expert numisma- 
tists or learned archasologists. Thus it is, 
that civilized man, in "this so-called twen- 
tieth century" of ours, finds his profit in 
the survival of mere monkey-tricks inher- 
ited from that distant ancestor who hung 
suspended by his prehensile tail from the 
boughs of the forest primeval. 

So far as I am aware no one has hitherto 
drawn attention to the obvious fact that the 
motives of the collector of buttons and of 
boot-heels are closely akin to those of the 
literary anthologists who gather into a sin- 
gle volume the scattered poems or prose 
specimens which seem to belong together. 
For his own idle amusement at first, he col- 
lects the poems of varied authorship which 
6 



BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 

deal with the same theme or which are writ- 
ten in the same form, considering in the one 
case the divergency of treatment and in the 
other the divergency of topic. He may be 
a lover of the Nicotian weed, seeking out 
all the ballads which have been indited in 
praise of tobacco; or he may be a lover of 
soulful verse, delighting in the variety of 
the lyric as it flourished in English under 
Elizabeth or under Victoria. And for his 
own sole pleasure he begins by bringing 
together the more accessible poems of the 
type in which his interest has been awak- 
ened. Then he finds himself wondering 
whether there are not many other poems of 
this same type that he has failed to find; 
and all at once he is launched on a voyage 
of discovery from which he returns with 
spoil of all sorts, and in the course of which 
he makes acquaintance with many a far 
country. 

When he contemplates the treasures he 
has thus been enabled to acquire as the 
result of his diligent search, and more espe- 
7 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

daily when he notes how much the charm 
of certain of his old favorites has been en- 
hanced by contrast with certain of his more 
recent discoveries, then he is moved to share 
his pleasure with others. He cannot help 
feeling sure that what has given him so 
much satisfaction is likely also to delight not 
a few lovers of literature, whose attention 
has not hitherto been attracted in that 
special direction. So he pursues his search, 
and he sets his collection in order, and he 
seeks faithfully for the missing specimens; 
and in time he publishes the result of his 
gleanings. Thus it was that Bell was 
inspired to present to the public his striking 
selection from the beautiful songs which 
besprinkle the works of the British drama- 
tists. And thus it was that the present 
writer has been moved to edit three several 
anthologies as different in theme as may be. 
'Poems of American Patriotism' was pub- 
lished in 1882 by Charles Scribner's Sons; 
and it was reissued by the same firm in 
1898, when It was included In a series of 



BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 

reading-books for schools. 'Ballads of 
Books' was published in 1886 by George 
J. Coombes; and it served as the founda- 
tion for a volume of the same title pre- 
pared by Mr. Andrew Lang and pub- 
lished in London in 1888 by Longmans, 
Green & Co. The original American 
collection was reissued in New York in 
1899 by Dodd, Mead & Co. 'American 
Familiar Verse : vers de societe' was pub- 
lished in 1904 by Longmans, Green & 
Co. as a volume of the 'Wampum Li- 
brary of American Literature.' A fourth 
volume, planned long ago, and not yet 
brought to completion, will select and set in 
order the chief poems which deal with the 
past history and which celebrate the present 
beauty of New York. 

The collection of the material for these 
several volumes, the hunting up of the 
poems which were not at hand, the sifting 
out of the verses which were felt to be un- 
worthy of their fellows, the preparation of 
an authentic text and of proper introduc- 
9 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

tory notes, — all this was a labor of love, 
no doubt, but it was a labor, for all that, 
a labor the weight of which no one will be 
disposed to deny who has ever ventured on 
the undertaking of an anthology. But it 
was a labor that of a certainty paid for 
itself in an increase of knowledge and in a 
broadening of outlook. And the search for 
the poems demanding inclusion in one or 
another of these three volumes led the 
writer into many a by-path of letters. It 
! increased his liking for the curiosities of 
! literature, as the elder Disraeli had termed 
them, — a liking originally awakened by a 
boyish perusal of Disraeli's own pages. To 
gratify this liking the papers in the present 
volume have been written. 

They are, for the most part, minor 
anthologies, — collections not important 
enough or not bulking big enough to de- 
mand Independent existence In a volume, 
each by Itself. And some of them are fairly 
to be called by-products of the longer and 
more important collections. For example, 

10 



BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 

the paper on the epigram as it has been 
written here in the United States was the 
natural result of the attempt to collect the 
best specimens of American familiar verse 
{vers de societe), the lyrics which are brief 
and brilliant and buoyant. And the paper 
on the quatrain, as this has been handled 
by American lyrists, was the outgrowth of 
the collection of American epigrams which 
revealed the need of making clear the dis- 
tinction between the epigram of the Greeks 
of old and the epigram of the English- 
speaking writers of to-day. 

To most careless users of books the 
anthologist is but a compiler, like the lexi- 
cographer, "a harmless drudge;" yet if any 
anthologists were ever inclined toward 
boastfulness, they would have little diffi- 
culty in proving that the practitioners of 
their humble craft had deserved well of the 
republic of letters; and they might recall 
with satisfaction the fact that Longfellow 
had prepared a bulky tome of selections 
from the 'Poets and Poetry of Europe' and 
II 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

that he had also supervised the long series 
of 'Poems of Places,' a lyrical gazeteer. 
They might well feel pride in claiming kin- 
ship in labor with the other American 
songster who has bestowed upon us 'A 
Victorian Anthology' and 'An American 
Anthology,' and with the British bard who 
made us all his debtors by the lyric jewels 
he heaped up in the 'Golden Treasury.' 
(1904.) 



Z2 



II 

A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 

THERE seems to be nothing that a 
small mind more eagerly de- 
lights in than the detection of 
the small resemblances which 
are likely to be discoverable when the works 
of different authors are rigorously com- 
pared; and there are assuredly few things 
that a large mind regards with a more lan- 
guid interest than the foolish and futile 
accusations of plagiarism now and again 
bandied about in the public prints. The 
man of large mind is both tolerant and 
careless. He knows that it is not rare for 
the same thought to occur independently 
and almost simultaneously to two original 
thinkers — just as the suggestion of natural 
selection came to Darwin and Wallace 
almost at the same time. Moreover, he is 
13 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

well aware that all workers have a right to 
avail themselves of whatsoever has been 
accomplished by their predecessors, so long 
as they do not make false pretences or seek 
to gain credit under false colors. 

If proof was needed that Poe was not a 
man of large mind, it might be found in the 
fact that he was guilty of an article on 'Mr. 
Longfellow and Other Plagiarists' ; and no 
one was surprised to learn that Poe him- 
self could be a plagiarist upon occasion, and 
that he borrowed for his 'Marginalia' 
Sheridan's joke about the phoenix and Mr. 
Whitbread's describing it as a poulterer 
would. Of course, it is possible that Poe 
invented this witticism for himself, 
although this is not at all likely, since the 
American lyrist was one of those who joked 
with difficulty. The jest, indeed, is very 
characteristic of the author of the 'School 
for Scandal' — and very unlike the other 
humorous attempts of the author of the 
♦Raven.' 

Tennyson once wrote to a critic who had 

14 



A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 

pointed out certain parallelisms in the 
'Princess': "Why not? Are not human 
eyes all over the world looking at the same 
objects, and must there not consequently be 
coincidences of thought and impressions 
and expressions ? It is scarcely possible for 
any one to say or write anything in this late 
time of the world to which, in all the rest 
of the literature of the world, a parallel 
could not som.ewhere be found." Lowell 
declared that it was now impossible to sink 
a spade in the soil of Parnassus without dis- 
turbing the bones of some dead poet. 
Shelley went so far as to assert that "all 
knowledge is reminiscence; the doctrine is 
far more ancient than the times of Plato, 
and as old as the venerable allegory that the 
Muses are the daughters of Memory; not 
one of the nine was ever said to be the child 
of Invention." And Mr. Aldrich in his 
quatrain on 'Originality' has asserted that 

No bird has ever uttered note 
That was not in some first bird's throat ; 
Since Eden's freshness and man's fall 
No rose has been original. 

15 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Just as Poe probably borrowed his merry 
jest from Sheridan, so very likely the re- 
mark of one of the characters in 'Lady 
Windemere's Fan' — "I can resist every- 
thing — except temptation" — is perhaps a 
reminiscence of the saying of the medieval 
Franc-Archer de Bagnolet, quoted by 
Rabelais, "I am not afraid of anything — 
except danger." But it was apparently 
quite independently but almost simultane- 
ously that a similar thought occurred to 
a Frenchman, an Englishman, and an 
American. The late Thomas B. Reed, 
sometime Speaker of the House of Repre- 
sentatives, once defined a statesman as "a 
successful politician — who is dead." Mr. 
Pinero, having in mind the rather boister- 
ous humor of the 'Rivals' or of 'She 
Stoops to Conquer,' has asserted that 
"a comedy is often only a farce — by a 
deceased dramatist." And in the journal 
of the Goncourts we can read the kindred 
remark that "genius is the talent of a dead 
man." 

i6 



A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 

When M. Rostand brought out 'UAig- 
lon' Its likeness in theme to 'Hamlet' was 
promptly pointed out; now the likeness of 
'Hamlet' to the 'Oresteia' is a commonplace 
of scholarship; but there is no resemblance 
whatsoever between the French play and 
the Greek tragedy, although they have each 
of them a certain superficial similarity to 
the English drama. Here we see that two 
dramas, each of which resembles a third, 
are not necessarily like each other. Up to 
the present time no literary detective has 
accused Mark Twain of overt plagiarism 
because he — probably unconsciously — 
transplanted certain Incidents of 'Romeo 
and Juliet' to the banks of the Mississippi, 
when Huckleberry Finn was setting before 
us boldly and simply the outcome of the 
long-standing Shepherdson-Grangerford 
feud. And, as yet, Mr. Kipling has not 
been held up to public contempt because he 
utilized in his story of the 'King's Ankus' 
certain devices which Chaucer had already 
employed In one of the 'Canterbury Tales.' 
17 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Mr. Kipling's 'Brushwood Boy' is one of 
the most beautiful of his stories, and it is 
one of the most original, both in conception 
and execution. But at the core of it is the 
possibility of two persons meeting In their 
dreams; and this idea was already to be 
found in Mr. Du Maurler's 'Peter Ibbet- 
son.' The same idea has since been devel- 
oped by Mr. Marion Crawford in 'Cecilia;' 
and also by Miss Elizabeth Jordan In 
a short story called 'Varick's Lady o' 
Dreams.' Did the two later writers get 
the suggestion of it from Mr. Kipling 
or from Mr. Du Maurler? Did Mr. 
Kipling even get It from Mr. Du Mau- 
rler? Or did each of the four Indepen- 
dently happen upon the tempting impos- 
sibility? It was Fitz James O'Brien 
who wrote 'What Was It?' — a thrilling 
tale of a strange creature, which could 
not be seen but could be felt; and Guy 
de Maupassant, in 'Le Horla,' introduces 
us to just such another uncanny and Impos- 
sible monster, palpable but Invisible. Did 
i8 



A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 

the Frenchman borrow this weird impossi- 
bihty from the Irish-American who had 
invented it thirty years earlier? Or did he 
reinvent it for himself? No wonder is it 
that Mr. Austin Dobson asks: 

Ah, World of ours, are you so gray 

And weary, World, of spinning, 
That you repeat the tales to-day 

You told at the beginning? 
For lo ! the same old myths that made 

The early stage-successes, 
Still hold the boards and still are played 

"With new effects and dresses." 

Students of folk-lore seem to be agreed 
— if indeed they are in accord about any- 
thing at all — that certain kinds of stones 
are likely to spring up spontaneously when- 
ever and wherever the conditions are favor- 
able, while tales of a different type are 
apparently transmitted swiftly and myste- 
riously from one country and one language 
to another land and another tongue. It 
was Whewell who asserted that all the Irish 
bulls had been calves in Greece; and it was 
Professor Tyrrel who neatly explained that 
19 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

the Irish bull differed from the bull of all 
other islands in that "it was always preg- 
nant." 

To trace these similarities, accidental as 
they are mostly, or intentional as they may 
be sometimes, is gratifying to the detective 
instinct, and it is an amusement harmless 
enough if we do not exaggerate the impor- 
tance of our chance finds, and if we recog- 
nize fully the right of every man to profit 
by all that has been accomplished by his 
predecessors. Every generation has the 
privilege of standing on the shoulders of 
the generation that went before ; but it has 
no right to pick the pockets of the first- 
comer. In an earlier paper on the 'Ethics 
of Plagiarism' the present writer suggested 
that the man who finds a new idea deserves 
the full credit of fresh invention; that the 
second user of this idea may possibly be 
considered a plagiarist; that the third per- 
son to utilize it is only lacking in originality, 
and that the fourth is merely drawing from 
the common stock. "And when the fifth 

20 



A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 

man takes it, that's research!" was the apt 
comment of a philosophic friend. 

The preceding paragraphs may perhaps 
appear to provide a portico somewhat too 
pretentious for the modest inquiry which is 
to follow. Their purpose was but to make 
it clear that this modest inquiry was not 
undertaken with any intent to denounce the 
crime of plagiarism. Its object is rather to 
show how many forms a pleasant conceit 
may assume as it travels down the centuries 
and as it migrates from one language to 
another. 

Some diligent readers of modern verse 
may chance to be acquainted with a triolet 
of the late W. E. Henley's, which turns 
upon the ease with which a triolet can be 
written : 

Easy is the triolet, 

If you really learn to make it! 
Once a neat refrain you get, 
Easy is the triolet. 
As you see ! — I pay my debt 

With another rhyme. Deuce take it. 
Easy is the triolet, 

If you really learn to make it ! 

21 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Probably more than one of those who 
may have glanced at this pleasantly phrased 
trifle recalled a rondeau of Mr. Austin 
Dobson's, which also found its subject-mat- 
ter in the conditions of the form itself: 

You bid me try, Blue-Eyes, to write 
A Rondeau. WhatT — forthwith? — To-night? 
Reflect. Some skill I have, 'tis true; — 
But thirteen lines ! — and rhymed on two ! 
"I must," you say. Ah, hapless plight! 
Still, there are five lines, — ranged aright. 
These Gallic bonds, I feared, would fright 
My easy muse. They did till you — 
You bid me try ! 
That makes them nine. The port's in sight; — 
'Tis all because your eyes are bright! 
Now just a pair to end with "oo," — 
When maids command, what can't we do ! 
Behold ! — the Rondeau, tasteful, light. 
You bid me try ! 

But Mr. Dobson, as is his wont, was 
scrupulously careful to put forth his ron- 
deau in English as a free imitation of a ron- 
deau in French by Voiture : 

Ma foy; c'est fait de moy. Car Isabeau 
M'a conjure de luy faire un Rondeau. 

Cela me met en une peine extreme. 

Quoy, treize vers, huit en eau, cinq en eme! 

22 



A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 

Je luy ferois aussi tot un bateau. 
En viola cinq, pourtant, en un monceau ; 
Faisons-cn huict, en invoquant Brodeau, 
Et puis mettons, par quelque stratageme, 
Ma foy, c'est fait. 
Si je pouvois encore de mon cerveau 
Tirer cinq vers, I'ouvrage seroit beau. 
Mais cependant, je suis dedans I'onzieme, 
Et si je croy que je fais le douzieme, 
En voila treize ajustes au niveau. 

Ma foy, c'est fait ! 

And this raises the question whether in 
Voiture we have found the first versifier 
who filled a fixed form by an airy discussion 
of the difficulties to be overcome by all who 
adventure upon that form; and here the 
answer is easy. Voiture was apparently 
only the first lyrist to rhyme a rondeau of 
this sort; for he had as a predecessor 
Desmarets, who had used this device to 
help him in the composition of a sonnet. 
And it is asserted that the Frenchman had 
borrowed the conceit from an Italian, 
Marini, a most voluminous sonneteer. Un- 
fortunately, the present writer has not been 
able to lay hands on Marini's sonnet, or on 
23 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

that of Desmarets, despite a diligent search. 
But the finding of the French lyric, and of 
the Italian that suggested it, is of less im- 
portance, since there is no doubt that both 
of them were derived from a Spanish 
original. 

In his 'New Art of Making Plays' Lope 
de Vega advised the dramaturgic novice 
that the sonnet-form was v/ell-fitted for 
soliloquies; but, although this particular 
sonnet is to be found in one of his plays, 
'La Nina de Plata,' it is not a soliloquy, 
being recited by the gracioso or comedian, 
frankly as a poetic composition. 

SONETO A VIOLANTE. 

Un soneto me manda hacer Violante : 
Que en me vida me he visto en tanto aprieto; 
Catorce versos dicen que es soneto : 

Burla burlando van los tres delante; 

Yd pense que no hallara consonante, 

Y estoy a la mitad de otro cuarteto; 
Mas si me veo en el primer terceto ; 

No hay cosa en los cuartetos que me espante 
En el primer terceto voy entrando, 

Y aun parece que entre con pie derecho, 

24 



A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 

Pucs fin con este verso le voy dando; 

Ya estoy en el segundo, y aun sospecho 
Que voy los trece versos acabando ; 

Contad si son catorce : ya esta hecho. 

In his study of the hfe and works of the 
great Spanish playwright, Lord Holland 
quoted an English adaptation of Lope's 
Spanish original, written by a certain 
Thomas Edwards, the author of a carefully 
forgotten discussion of the 'Canons of 
Criticism,' these canons being weapons of 
offence primed and aimed to blow War- 
burton off the face of the earth. This law- 
yer-critic refused to bind himself down to 
the strict Guittonian form of the sonnet; 
and his wit was not over nimble; but he 
managed to get his fourteen rhymes in pre- 
sentable shape : 

Capricious Wray a sonnet needs must have : 

I ne'er was so put to't before — a sonnet? 

Why, fourteen verses must be spent upon it. 
'Tis good, however, I've conquer'd the first stave. 

Yet I shall ne'er find rhvmes enough by half, 
Said I, and found myself in the midst of the second: 
If twice four verses were fairly reckon'd 

I should turn back on the hardest part, and laugh. 

25 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Thus far with good success I think I've scribbled. 
And of twice seven lines have clear got o'er ten. 

Courage ! Another'll finish the first triplet ; 
Thanks to the muse, my work begins to shorten, 
There's thirteen lines got through, driblet by drib- 
let, 
'Tis done ! count how you will, I warrant there's 
fourteen. 

There is a conscientious rigidity about 
this sturdy British sonneteer and an 
eighteenth-century stiffness about his sacri- 
fice to the muse which contrast sharply with 
the Gallic vivacity and the nineteenth-cen- 
tury expertness to be found in a sonnet by 
the late Henri Meilhac (the collaborator of 
M. Ludovic Halevy, in the composition of 
the 'Belle Helene,' of the 'Grande Duch- 
esse de Gerolstein' and of the 'Perichole'), 
No one can now declare with certainty 
whether Meilhac borrowed the suggestion 
from Desmarets or Voiture, his predeces- 
sors in his own tongue, or whether he took 
it over from the Italian or from the 
Spanish. In fact, Meilhac was qfuite ingen- 
ious enough to have invented the device for 
26 



A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 

his own use; and his sonnet has the bril- 
liancy and the buoyancy which we expect 
to find in the best vers de societe: 

UN SONNET. 

Un Sonnet, dites-vous ; savez-vous bien, Madame, 
Qu'il me faudra trouver trois rimes a sonnet? 

Madame, heureusement, rime avec ame et flamme, 
Et le premier quatrain me semble assez complet. 

J'entame le second, le second je I'ent.me, 
Et prends en I'entament un air tout guilleret, 

Car ne m'etant encor point servi du mot ame, 
Je compte m'en servir, et m'en sers, en effet. 

Vous m'accorderez bien, maintenant, j 'imagine, 
Qu'un sonnet sans amour ferait fort triste mine, 
Qu'il aurait I'air boiteux, contrefait, mal tourne. 

II nous faut de I'amour, il nous en faut quand meme; 
J'ecris done en tremblant; je vous aime, ou je t'aime, 
Et voila, pour le coup, mon sonnet termine. 

It was Meilhac's sonnet which the late 
Henry Cuyler Bunner paraphrased, carry- 
ing over into English, so far as might be 
possible, not only the fundamental conceit 
but also the most of the minor felicities of 
V 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

the French lyrist. Bunner's 'Sonnet to 
Order' was avowedly an imitation; and, 
when it was first published in an American 
magazine, it was accompanied by its French 
original : 

A sonnet would you have? Know you, my pet, 

For sonnets fourteen lines are necessary. 

Ah, necessary rhymes, by luck, to fairy — 
I'll call yoj one, and the first quatrain get. 
This meets half-way the second ; half-way met, 

One meets an obstacle in a manner airy. 

But here, though it is not your name, as Mary 
I'll set you down, settling the second set. 

Now, you'll i-dmit, a sonnet without love, 
Without the savor of a woman in't, 
Were profanation of poetic art. 
Love, above all things ! So 'tis writ above. 
Nor there alone. Your sonneteer, I'd hint. 
Gives you this sonnet here with all his heart. 

One of the scholarly contributors to Petit 
de Julleville's history of the French lan- 
guage and literature remarked that "noth- 
ing is longer than a sonnet — when there is 
nothing in it" ; and here we have had some 
half-dozen sonnets with only one thought 
28 



A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 

in the lot of them. Yet another is called 
'A Difficult Sonnet' ; and it was found amid 
the flotsam and jetsam of a scrap-book, 
credited vaguely to the University Maga- 
zine, and seemingly clipped out some twen- 
ty or thirty years ago. It does not quite 
continue the tradition that has here been 
traced down through the modern languages; 
indeed, the obvious desire of the poet to 
moralize points to an English lyrist who 
believed in his own originality: 

With an idea I set to write a sonnet ; 
The subject was so difficult and terse, 
I could not quite bring right the tiresome verse, 

Much labor though I spent, and pens, upon it: 

Still I plod on, and line by line I con it, 
Each time with better words to add, or worse, 
Till it comes right; and, as I last rehearse 

The settled stanza, make fair copy on it. 

This done, I take my blotted rough endeavor. 
Covering some sheets with every kind of scrawl 

Of my first failures, some of them quite clever; 
Into a little pack I bring them all. 

Tear up. (Life is the Poem — where's the taper? 

How shall I burn my blotted bits of paper? 

The triolet, the rondeau, and the sonnet 
have each in turn been taken by lyrists who 
29 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

wished thus to exploit their own playful- 
ness ; and the ballade is the only other fixed 
form of verse likely to prove equally tempt- 
ing. But a conscientious search has failed 
to find any ballade turning on the difficulty 
of making a ballade, with its three octaves, 
its envoy, its refrain, and its three rhymes, 
repeated and interlaced. In 'Cyrano de 
Bergerac,' M. Rostand makes his hero im- 
provise a ballade while he is fighting a duel 
— a gorgeous example of bravado and bra- 
vura; and the verses, purporting to be put 
together in the very moment of deadly com- 
bat, abound in allusions to the structure of 
the ballade itself. And yet the basis of M. 
Rostand's ballade, with its refrain "^ la fin 
de V envoi, je louche," does not differ much 
from that of Lope de Vega, although the 
superstructure of the later lyric achieves a 
certain originality. There are at least two 
English translations of M. Rostand's play; 
but any rendering of the flashing lines of 
the flamboyant original cannot but seem a 
little pale. Who was it first asserted that a 
30 



A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 

translated poem was like a boiled straw- 
berry? 

Of all the Teutonic tongues our own 
English is the almost only one which has 
taken part in these international borrow- 
ings. Students of German poetry, and of 
Dutch, have been unable to answ^er the 
appeal for kindred lyrics from these lan- 
guages. 

In Danish — so a kind correspondent in 
Copenhagen has informed me — there is a 
sonnet "by request" from the pen of 
Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860). He 
was a student of Spanish literature, and he 
presents his own poem as an imitation of a 
Spanish original: 

SONET (efter Mendoza) 

I ^nsker en Sonet. Som I befaler ! 
Det f^rste med det andet Vers er skrevet, 
Og er ei Nummer Tre tilskamme blevet, 
Med fjcrde Vers jeg een Qvartet betaler. 

Jeg kommer til det fcmte. Hjelp! Jeg daler! 
Sanct Jacob! Marche ! Det sjette fremad drevet! 
Hvis jeg det syvende kun faaer oplevet, 
Har jeg dog Livet frelst af disse Qvaler 1 

31 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Nu er jeg fasrdig med de to Qvartetter. 
Hvad synes jer! Forstaaer jeg mig at vende? 
Men Himlen veed, jeg skjselver for Tercetter! 

Og hvis jeg kan med ^Ere slutte denne, 
Jeg skriver i mit Liv ei fleer Sonetter, 
Da denne fjzirste, Gud skee Lov, fik Ende ! 

Until this Danish lyric came to light, 
it seemed as though the original inventor 
of the pleasant device was indisputably 
Lope de Vega (i 562-1 635). But Hei- 
berg gives the credit to the author of the 
earliest picaresque romance 'Lazarillo de 
Tormes', Diego Hurtando de Mendoza, 
the brilliant historian (i 503-1 575), who 
died when Lope was but a boy of thirteen. 
And just after the Danish sonnet had 
reached me, another kind correspondent 
sent me from Idaho this English version 
of Mendoza's original, translated by Mat- 
thew Russell: — 

THE SONNET. 
You ask a sonnet, lady, and behold ! 

The first- line and the second are complete. 

If equal luck I in the third should meet, 
With one verse more the first quatrain is told. 

32 



A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 

St. James for Spain ! the fifth verse is outrolled — 
Now for the sixth. 'Twill be a gallant feat 
If after all I manage to retreat 
Safe with my life from this encounter bold. 

Already, rounded well, each quatrain stands. 
What say you, lady? Do I bravely speed? 
Yet, ah I heaven knows the tercets me affright ; 

And if this sonnet were but off my hands, 
Another I should ne'er attempt, indeed. 
But now, thank God, my sonnet's finished quite. 

Apparently the Northern tongues have 
not taken so kindly to the fixed forms as 
the Southern languages did. And yet no 
example of a lyric containing this conceit 
has been forthcoming from Portuguese or 
from Provencal. This last deficiency is 
the more remarkable, since the origin of all 
the fixed forms has been traced to that 
home of minstrelsy. The sonnet was in- 
vented by a Provencal lyrist, just as the 
rondeau was, and the ballade also. 

The sonnet established itself first, and 
gained the widest acceptance; and it is only 
of late that the rondeau and the ballade 
have achieved a certain popularity, far 

33 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

inferior to that of the sonnet. Indeed, of 
all the fixed forms the sonnet Is at once 
the best known and the most noble. It 
has been used to convey the loftiest of 
messages; it has done this successfully with- 
out calling undue attention to the necessary 
artifice of its construction. The rondeau, 
on the other hand, and the ballade also, 
have seemed best fitted for lighter themes 
of minor importance. They carry more 
appropriately the ingenious prettiness of 
vers de societe; whereas the sonnet has 
proved itself to be worthy of the most 
elevated themes. 

In seeking to discover what poet it was 
who first devised a lyric in a fixed form, 
turning on the arbitrary difficulty of the 
form itself, there is no need to go further 
back than the Renascence, since the fixed 
form was a product of the Renascence, 
impossible until after rhyme had been 
elaborated in the Middle Ages. In the 
lyrics of Rome and Greece, with all their 
exquisite modulations of metre, there was 
34 



A THEME, WITH VARIATIONS 

no rhyme ; and therefore no fixed form was 
possible, built upon an artful adjustment 
of repeated and contrasted rhymes. 

In Hebrew versification, it ought to be 
noted here, the acrostic was held in high 
esteem. Perchance there exists in Hebrew 
an acrostic, setting forth the difliculty to 
be vanquished by every bard who seeks 
to write an acrostic. 
(1903) 

P. S. — There is a motto popular in the 
minor marts of trade: "If you don't see 
what you want, ask for it." And the 
original publication of this inquiry 
promptly moved an anonymous British 
bard to provide the needed ballade based 
on the difficulty of its own structure. He 
called it a 'Ballade in the Making.' 

Do you desire me, friend, to write 

The Ballade of Clement Marot, 
And incidentally indite 

The lines on which it ought to go? 

Then, firstly, I would have you know, 
One must be gifted with resource. 

For, like the Rondel and Rondeau, 
The Ballade is a tour dc force. 

35 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Three rhymes you need ; but choose aright, 

For one (like this of mine in "O") 
Comes fourteen times ; then find a bright 

Refrain, and keep it mot pour mot 

To fall spontaneously below 
Each of three septets; this, of course, 

Needs ingenuity, for oh ! 
The Ballade is a tour de force. 

Think not to find the task as light 

As Rostand tells did Cyrano, 
Composing octaves through a fight 

And envoy as he pinked his foe. 

Remember, too, your verse should flow 
Smooth as a river from its source — 

So smooth, in fact, as not to show 
'^he Ballade is a tour de force. 

L'ENVOI. 
Envoy, addressed to so-and-so, 

Should all that goes before indorse, 
As thus : — O reader mine, I trow 

The Ballade is a tour de force. 



3(> 



Ill 

UNWRITTEN BOOKS 

TO most of the admirers of Dickens 
the 'Mystery of Edwin Drood' 
remains still a mystery, since the 
author died suddenly and before 
he had himself disclosed his own answer 
to his serial conundrum. We may give 
as many guesses as we choose, we cannot 
be absolutely certain that our solution of 
the problem is the real one. Thackeray 
was far above any mystery-mongering of 
this sort, and he scorned to entrap his 
readers into puzzling over a mere enigma 
of plot; but he had acquired from Dickens 
the inartistic habit of beginning the inter- 
mittent publication of a novel before he 
had composed the final chapters, and 
'Denis Duval' remains to us an interrupted 
beginning of what might have been a 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

worthy companion of 'Henry Esmond.' 
More than one attempt was made to com- 
plete Dickens's broken narrative, but no 
rash writer was hardy enough to venture 
on a continuation of Thackeray's novel. 
When Wilkie Collins left a serial unfin- 
ished, Sir Walter Besant kindly supplied 
a conclusion; and Mr. Quiller-Couch did 
a like friendly service for Robert Louis 
Stevenson. 

Here in America Hawthorne tried three 
times to get his strange story of the bloody 
footstep into a shape satisfactory to his 
fastidious sense of form, and he allowed 
'The Dolliver Romance' to begin to appear 
in a magazine before he had completed 
the manuscript. The sudden death of 
Dickens and of Thackeray was his also, 
and his instalment of life in this world 
was sharply cut off — to be continued in 
our next. As in Thackeray's case, so in 
Hawthorne's, the impossibility of com- 
pleting what the master had begun was so 
plain that even the most foolishly con- 
38 



UNWRITTEN BOOKS 

celted have restrained their pens from the 
task. As Hawthorne's classmate, Long- 
fellow, beautifully phrased it: 

There, in seclusion and remote from men, 

The wizard hand lies cold, 
Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, 

And left the tale half-told. 

Ah ! who shall lift that wand of magic power, 

And the lost clue regain? 
The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower 

Unfinished must remain. 

Hawthorne, however, and Thackeray 
had at least begun these books; the 'Dol- 
liver Romance' and 'Denis Duval' remain 
unfinished, but they were not absolutely 
unwritten. There are in the records of 
literature other books by other authors 
actually announced as these were, but 
never even begun. Some of these un- 
written books may have been thought out, 
composed, ready to be set down in black 
and white with pen and ink, complete in 
the author's head, and lacking the final and 
almost mechanical registration. Others 

39 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

seem to have been mere projects, little 
more than vague dreams, for a possible 
future realisation. At one stage of its 
existence every book is but a castle in the 
air; and, the persevering author acts on 
Thoreau's assertion, that the air is the 
proper place for a castle, and that what 
needs to be done is only to build a solid 
foundation under it. 

Moliere is said by most of his biog- 
raphers to have made a translation from 
Lucretius; and if this ever really existed 
it is now lost. But another of Moliere's 
works never did exist — the comedy of 
'L'Homme de Cour' — which he used to 
talk about as certain to be his final mas- 
terpiece, but of which nothing is now 
known. So Richard Brinsley Sheridan 
made ready to write a successor to the 
'Rivals' and the 'School for Scandal,' on 
the theme of 'Affectation,' but this admira- 
ble subject did not tempt him to the actual 
labor of composition. He made a few 
notes for the proposed play, and pursued 
40 



UNWRITTEN BOOKS 

it no further. Perhaps he was too ab- 
sorbed in the pleasures of society or in the 
delights of politics; perhaps he was satis- 
fied with the comedies he had already writ- 
ten and willing to rest his title to remem- 
brance upon these. Michael Kelly tells 
us how he once said to Sheridan that the 
manager of Drury Lane would never write 
another comedy, since he was afraid — 
afraid of the author of the 'School for 
Scandal,' And like Moliere and like Sheri- 
dan, Cervantes had projected a final play, 
destined to eclipse all its predecessors — 
'Engafio a los Ojos' — and yet not destined 
to see the light of day, since the author 
of 'Don Quixote' died before it was ready, 
if indeed it was ever begun. 

For years the paper covers of every 
new book that Victor Hugo issued con- 
tinued to announce as soon to be pub- 
lished a romance entitled 'La Quinquen- 
grogne.' Many posthumous volumes of 
the French poet's writing in prose and 
verse have been sent forth by his literary 
41 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

executors, but of this oddly entitled fic- 
tion nothing has been heard. Theophile 
Gautier's 'Capitaine Fracasse' was pro- 
claimed as almost ready for print for 
many long years before the first word of 
it was actually written; but at last Gautier 
did write up to his title. Which one 
of his Romanticist companions in arms 
was it who achieved instant fame on his 
declaration of intention to astound the 
world sooner or later with a treatise, 'Sur 
rincommodite des Commodes?' — a treat- 
ise which, like a bill in Congress, has been 
read by title only. 

In 1862, Alphonse Daudet in like man- 
ner announced as "in press" a volume of 
stories, which was to be called 'Le Pen- 
tameron,' and which remained unpublished 
and probably unwritten when he died in 
1897. A novel of Daudet's — 'Trousseaux 
et Layettes' — about which he was in the 
habit of conversing with his Intim.ates in 
the later years of his life, seems to have 
been begun, but apparently it was not very 
42 



UNWRITTEN BOOKS 

far advanced when death overtook him. 
And the younger Dumas has left on record 
more than one reference to a comedy to 
be called 'La Route de Thebes', planned 
before 'Francillon,' but never brought to 
the point of perfection during the author's 
lifetime. 

In the original prospectus of M. Jules 
Jusserand's admirable series of critical 
biographies, 'Les Grands Ecrivains Fran- 
gais,' it was asserted that M. Anatole 
France would contribute the volume on 
Racine and M, Jules Lemaitre that on 
Alfred de Musset. But when the time 
came to publish the book on Racine its 
author was found to be not M. France, 
but M. Gustave Larroumet; and the vol- 
ume on Musset was prepared, not by M. 
Lemaitre, but by Mme. Arvede Barine. 
Boileau was to have been undertaken by 
M. Ferdinand Brunetiere, and Rousseau 
by the late Victor Cherbuliez; but M. 
Gustave Lanson was the author of the 
account of the great classic critic, and M. 

43 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Chuquet was responsible for the biogra- 
phy of the progenitor of French Roman- 
ticism. It is more than ten years since the 
prospectus of this series was prepared, and 
M. Brunetiere has not yet given us his 
promised study of Voltaire, nor has M. 
Paul Bourget vouchsafed us his analysis of 
Balzac. 

Talne was to have written the life of 
Sainte-Beuve for this series, but he died 
before he had accomplished the pleasant 
and appropriate task. In like manner 
Lowell at the time of his death had made 
little progress with the volume on Haw- 
thorne which he had agreed to prepare 
for the corresponding series in this coun- 
try, Mr. Warner's 'American Men of 
Letters'; and to an American in London, 
with whom he was talking over his theme, 
Lowell expressed his gentle dissatisfaction 
with the volume on Hawthorne contrib- 
uted to the 'English Men of Letters' by 
Mr, Henry James. Lowell remarked that 
Hawthorne was of New England, all 

44 



UNWRITTEN BOOKS 

compact, and could be treated adequately 
only by a New Englander, whereas Mr. 
James, in so far as he was an American at 
all, was a New Yorker. 

The 'American Men of Letters' series 
has had almost as many substitutions as 
the 'Grands Ecrivains Francais.' Mr. 
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was to have writ- 
ten the volume on N. P. Willis, and Pro- 
fessor Beers did write it. Mr. George 
W. Cable undertook to prepare an account 
of William Gilmore Simms, and Professor 
Trent did prepare it. Mr. Howells was 
expected to write the life of Longfellow, 
and Colonel Higginson took it over. And 
in the original prospectus of the corre- 
sppnding British series, the earliest of the 
three, Mr. John Morley's 'English Men of 
Letters,' the editor reserved to himself two 
authors, Gray and Burke. The study of 
Burke he has published, but that of Gray 
he turned over to Mr. Gosse. And the 
volume on Berkeley which the late Profes- 
sor Huxley was to prepare for Mr. Mor- 
45 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

ley's series never got itself written, although 
that on Hume did. 

It was more or less in rivalry with Mr. 
Morley's series that Mr. Andrew Lang 
began a collection of 'English Worthies,' 
which the editor himself was to provide 
with a biography of Izaak Walton — a 
project abandoned apparently when the 
series itself was given up. And it was 
for this set of 'English Worthies' that 
Robert Louis Stevenson made ready to 
celebrate the deeds of Wellington, as un- 
likely a subject as could well be chosen 
by him — although his master, Scott, had 
made money by a huge book about Na- 
poleon. When one of Stevenson's inti- 
mates — one of his collaborators, indeed 
— was asked why the victor of Waterloo 
had been selected by the author of the 
'Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' 
the laughing answer was, "Oh, Louis 
thinks he has an eye for strategy and 
tactics." 

To the excellent series of 'History and 
46 



UNWRITTEN BOOKS 

Literature Primers,' which was edited by 
J. R. Green, the historian, and which con- 
tains the extraordinarily successful primer 
of English literature by Mr. Stopford 
Brooke and the equally illuminative primer 
of Greek literature by Professor Jebb, 
Dean Farrar was to contribute a primer 
of Latin literature. And to a kindred 
series of little books on 'Classical Writers,' 
Professor James Bryce had promised a 
study of Herodotus. Both of these books, 
now overdue for more than half a score 
of years, remain unwritten. 

And what has become of the 'Book of 
the Forty-five Mornings' — most alluring 
title — which Mr. Rudyard Kipling dangled 
before our eyes almost as long ago? 
Everything comes to him who waits, but 
have we not waited long enough for this? 

Perhaps one or another of these un- 
written books by men of letters still alive 
may get themselves Into print all in good 
time; and, perhaps, none of them will ever 
see the light. And it may be that their 

47 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

authors are wise in their own generation, 
in so far as they may prefer the contem- 
plation of a possibility never to be at- 
tempted to any effort to possess a reality 
that might be a bitter disappointment. 
No unwritten book can ever be a reproach 
to an author or a burden to his friends, 
nor can it gratify his enemies. No un- 
written poem can be picked to pieces by 
criticasters. No unwritten play can be 
damned by faint praise. As Scribe, that 
wiliest of playwrights, once declared, 
"What is cut out is never hissed." What 
is unwritten cannot be abused offensively, 
nor can it be eulogized effusively — which 
to a sincere author may be even more dis- 
tasteful. 

No author was ever more frankly sin- 
cere than Whittier; and it was Whittier 
who wrote : 

Let the thick curtain fall ; 
I better know than all 
How little I have gained, 
How vast the unattained. 
48 



UNWRITTEN BOOKS 

Sweeter than any sung 

My songs that found no tongue. 

Nobler than any fact 

My wish that failed the act. 

Others shall sing the song, 
Others shall right the wrong- 
Finish what I begin— 
And all I fail of, win. 
(1899). 



49 



IV 

SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 

IN the characteristic little book of 
little essays which Mr. Aldrich has 
chosen to call 'Ponkapog Papers' 
there are half a hundred pages of 
'Asides' — fragmentary and unrelated par- 
agraphs, compounded of cleverness and 
shrewdness and wit. In reading these 
pages we feel almost as though the author 
had permitted us to peep into his note- 
book; and we find ourselves wondering 
whether our manners ought not to bid us 
close the volume. These 'Asides' seem 
to be far less labored and less self-conscious 
than the 'Marginalia,' most of which Poe 
chipped out of the longer essays and re- 
views that he did not care to reprint in 
full. 

Mr. Aldrich tells us that in the blotted 
50 



SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 

memorandum-book from which he has 
chosen these chance paragraphs, there are 
a score or two of suggestions for essays 
and for sketches and for poems which he 
has not written and which he never will 
write. "The instant I jot down an idea," 
he informs us, "the desire to utilize it 
leaves me, and I turn away to do something 
unpremeditated. The shabby volume has 
become a sort of Potter's Field where I 
bury my intentions, good and bad, without 
any belief in their final resurrection." As 
if in proof of this confession, Mr. Aldrich 
has included among these 'Asides' two or 
three suggestions, which he does not intend 
to utilize himself and which he generously 
presents to the public. They are seed-corn 
for stories which he has not cared to plant 
and tend and harvest himself. 

Here is one of these undeveloped imagin- 
ings: 

"In his memoirs, Krapotkin states the 
singular fact that the natives of the Ma- 
layan Archipelago have an idea that some- 
51 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

thing is extracted from them when their 
hkenesses are taken by photography. Here 
is the motive for a fantastic short-story, in 
which the hero — an author in vogue or a 
popular actor — might be depicted as hav- 
ing all his good qualities gradually photo- 
graphed out of him. This could well be 
the result of a too prolonged indulgence in 
the effort to 'look natural.' First the man 
loses his charming simplicity; then he be- 
gins to pose in intellectual attitudes, with 
finger on brow; then he becomes morbidly 
self-conscious, and finally ends in an asylum 
for incurable egotists." 

And here is a second as appallingly 
Imaginative as the first was humorously 
fanciful: "Imagine all human beings swept 
off the face of the earth, excepting one 
man. Imagine this man in some vast city, 
New York or London, Imagine him on 
the third or fourth day of his solitude sit- 
ting in a house and hearing a ring at the 
door-bell !" 

As we read this we cannot but wonder 
52 



SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 

whether the bare idea thus boldly thrown 
out is not more powerful than any more 
amply wrought tale could be, even if it 
was to be told with all Mr. Aldrich's own 
delicate ingenuity. And then we wonder 
whether the author refrained from writing 
this story himself for the reason he has 
given us, — that he tired of his own sug- 
gestions so soon as he got them down in 
black and white — or whether in this case 
his generosity to the public is not due to 
the intuitive feeling of an accomplished 
craftsman that the naked notion, stark and 
unadorned, is more striking and more pow- 
erful in its simplicity than it would be if 
it was elaborated according to all the pre- 
cepts of the art of fiction. 

In Poe's 'Marginalia' there Is one pas- 
sage In some measure akin to Mr. Aldrich's 
second suggestion. "I have sometimes 
amused myself," the poet declared, "by 
endeavoring to fancy what would be the 
fate of an individual gifted, or rather 
accursed, with an intellect very far supe- 

53 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

rior to that of his race. Of course he 
would be conscious of his superiority; nor 
could he (if otherwise constituted as man 
is) help manifesting his consciousness. 
Thus he would make enemies at all points. 
And — since his opinions and speculations 
would widely differ from those of all man- 
kind — that he would be considered as a 
madman, is evident. How horribly pain- 
ful such a condition ! Hell could invent 
no greater torture than that of being 
charged with abnormal weakness on ac- 
count of being abnormally strong." 

Here again the suggestion itself in its 
bare simplicity is more effective than any 
completed story. But there is another of 
Poe's notions which seems not so difficult 
of treatment and which he might very 
readily have carried out. He called it 
'A Suggestion for a Magazine Article.' 

"Here is a good idea for a magazine 

paper; let somebody 'work it up.' A 

flippant pretender to universal acquirement 

— a would-be Crichton — engrosses, for an 

54 



SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 

hour or two, perhaps, the attention of a 
large company, most of whom are pro- 
foundly impressed by his knowledge. He 
is very witty, in especial, at the expense 
of a modest young gentleman, who ven- 
tures to make no reply, and who, finally, 
leaves the room as if overwhelmed with 
confusion ; the Crichton greeting his exit 
with a laugh. Presently he returns, fol- 
lowed by a footman carrying an armful 
of books. These are deposited on the 
table. The young gentleman now, refer- 
ring to some pencilled notes which he had 
been secretly taking during the Crichton's 
display of erudition, pins the latter to his 
statements, each by each, and refutes them 
all in turn, by reference to the very authori- 
ties cited by the egotist himself, whose 
ignorance at all points is thus made appar- 
ent." 

With characteristic affectation Poe in- 
sisted that his 'Marginalia' had been writ- 
ten in his books, on the margins themselves 
when these happened to be ample enough, 
55 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

and on a slip of paper deposited between 
the leaves when what he had to note was 
"too much to be included within the nar- 
row limits of a margin." He admitted 
this to be a whim, and declared that it might 
"be not only a very hackneyed, but a very 
idle practice," but he asserted that he per- 
sisted in it because it afforded him pleasure. 
He maintained that "the purely marginal 
jottings, done with no eye to the Memo- 
randum Book, have a distinct complexion, 
and not only not a distinct purpose, but 
none at all; this it is which imparts to them 
a value." Unfortunately for Poe's claim 
that in these fragmentary notes he was 
talking "freshly, boldly, originally," his 
editors have been able to trace the most 
of his paragraphs to articles of his which 
he did not care to reprint in full. As Mr. 
Stedman explains, "they afforded the maga- 
zinist an easy way of making copy," since 
"they were largely made up of passages 
lifted from earlier essays and reviews." 
And Mr. Stedman also points out how 
56 



SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 

Poe's pretence that his 'Marginalia' are 
what their prekide and title imply, "is 
made transparent by their formal, pre- 
meditated style, so different from that of 
Hawthorne's *Note-Books,' or that of 
Thoreau's posthumous apothegms and 
reflections." 

It is the charm of Hawthorne's 'Note- 
Books' that they really were written for 
himself alone and with no thought of pub- 
lication. Although he went to them for 
material for the book about his English 
sojourn, 'Our Old Home,' and although 
he picked out of them many an idea which 
he worked up in a tale or in a romance, 
he kept them for his own eye only. As 
his widow asserted when she made a selec- 
tion from these journals for publication 
several years after his death, he was "enter- 
taining, and not asserting, opinions and 
ideas." She insisted that her husband was 
questioning, doubting and reflecting with 
his pen, and, as it were, instructing him- 
self, — so that his note-books should be 
57 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

read "not as definitive conclusions of his 
mind, but merely as passing impressions 
often." 

The later journals kept in Great Britain, 
in France and in Italy are entertaining 
because they give us the impressions of 
Hawthorne himself, recorded at the mo- 
ment of reception often; but they are far 
less interesting and less valuable than the 
note-books he filled in his youth before he 
had ever left his native land. Here we 
get very close to him; we see his mind 
at work; we trace the first hint of a story 
as he jots it down and we can see it grow- 
ing as it takes root in his mind. For ex- 
ample, the idea of the 'Virtuoso's Collec- 
tion' came to him again and again in 
slightly different forms; and as we turn 
the pages of his note-books we can dis- 
cover when it was that he happened upon 
one and another of the marvellous curiosi- 
ties which enriched the strange gathering. 
In like manner the first suggestion of that 
characteristic tale, the 'Birthmark,' is set 
58 



SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 

down in three lines, which tell the whole 
story: "A person to be in possession of 
something as perfect as mortal man has 
a right to demand; he tries to make it 
better, and ruins it entirely." 

Sometimes the suggestion is merely fan- 
ciful, and too diaphanous to withstand 
elaboration: "A person to catch fire-flies, 
and try to kindle his household fire with 
them. It would be symbolical of some- 
thing." Sometimes the suggestion is bold 
enough and alluring, but not to be accom- 
plished without a complicated machinery, 
which would detract from its directness: 
"The situation of a man in the midst of 
a crowd, yet as completely in the power 
of another, life and all, as they two were 
in the deepest solitude." Sometimes the 
suggestion is so characteristic, so indi- 
vidual, so Hawthornesque, that we find 
ourselves wondering how it was that it 
did not tempt Hawthorne himself to its 
ampler unfolding: "A person to be writing 
a tale, and to find that it shapes itself 

59 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

against his intentions; that the characters 
act otherwise than he thought; that unfore- 
seen events occur; and a catastrophe comes 
which he strives in vain to avert. It might 
shadow forth his own fate — he having 
made himself one of the personages." Or 
this: "Follow out the fantasy of a man 
taking his life by instalments, instead of 
at one payment, — say ten years of life 
alternately with ten years of suspended 
animation." Of course this last idea has 
a certain kinship with 'Rip van Winkle' 
and with the 'Man with the Broken Ear;' 
but it differs in that Hawthorne supposes 
his hero to act voluntarily and more than 
once, whereas there was but a single and 
involuntary suspension of animation in 
Irving's tale and in About's. 

Another of Hawthorne's suggestions he 
might have treated himself, no doubt, with 
the delicate aroma of pure romance; but 
the theme would also lend itself to a wholly 
different treatment, by a novelist enamored 
of real things and of the externals of life : 
60 



SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 

"A story, the hero of which is to be repre- 
sented as naturally capable of deep and 
strong passion, and looking forward to the 
time when he shall feel passionate love, 
which is to be the great event of his exist- 
ence. But it so chances that he never falls 
in love, and although he gives up the ex- 
pectation of so doing, and marries calmly, 
yet it is somewhat sadly, with sentiments 
merely of esteem for his bride. The lady 
might be one who had loved him early in 
life, but whom then, in his expectation of 
passionate love, he had scorned." 

No doubt more than one of these sug- 
gestions fructified in the minds of one or 
another reader of Hawthorne's 'Note- 
Books' who happened also to be writers of 
fiction. If the present writer may offer 
himself as a witness, or if he may be al- 
lowed to enter the confessional, he admits 
that a short-story of his composition, 
'Esther Feverel,' was only an attempt to 
carry out a hint of Hawthorne's: "An 
old looking-glass; somebody finds out the 
6i 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

secret of making all the images that have 
been reflected in it pass back again across 
its surface." And everybody knows that 
it was a story told to Hawthorne by a 
friend, and duly entered in the 'Note- 
Books' which he abandoned to his class- 
mate Longfellow to treat in verse as 
'Evangeline.' 

In the volume of essays and sketches of 
travel which Mr. Howells has called 
'Literature and Life,' and to which he gave 
an accurate sub-title when he characterized 
them as 'Studies,' there is one article con- 
taining the plot for a story. The paper is 
named 'Worries of a Winter Walk' and 
it narrates how Mr. Howells, in his pil- 
grimages about New York, went over 
toward the East River and came "upon a 
bit of our motley life, a fact of our piebald 
civilization," which perplexed him and 
which suggested a little love-story. He 
tells us how the first notion of the tale 
occurred to him, evoked by an unexpected 
fact he had observed; and then with 1am- 
62 



SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 

bent humor he traces the succcessive steps 
by which the story grew in his mind, as 
it slowly took shape and began to have 
an independent existence. It was an idyl 
of the East Side, a kodak-picture snapped 
in the midst of our cosmopolitan conglom- 
eration of foreign peoples here in this 
crowded island. Mr. Howells sets forth 
one after another the variations of the 
little tale in his own mind, those which he 
decided to reject as well as those which he 
accepted. And finally he presents us with 
three possible terminations of the story, as 
though in doubt himself which was in fact 
the best. The narrative is shot through 
with the gentle irony and with the honest 
self-detachment so characteristic of the 
creator of 'Silas Lapham.' 

In the end we find that he has not actu- 
ally written out his story; he has merely 
told us how he might have written it. But 
the tale is complete; and we can see for 
ourselves — if only we bring our share of 
sympathetic imagination — how it would 
63 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

read if he had chosen to tell it simply as 
he has told his other stories. To the 
reader to whom a story is only a story — 
to the reader who is entertained only by 
what has happened and who is interested 
only in discovering how it turns out at last 
— perhaps the irony and the self-detach- 
ment are a little disconcerting. But to the 
scantier band who are alive to the subtle 
relations of literature and life, the tale 
thus presented is far more attractive than 
if it had been presented in the author's 
usual fashion. And this the author him- 
self knew, with that understanding of the 
difficulties of his craft which is part of his 
equipment as a man of letters. The story 
itself remains unwritten, but not unwrit- 
able; and any other teller of tales who is 
in search of a ready-made plot can have 
it for the taking. But if any teller of 
tales does borrow it from Mr. Howells's 
book, and if he sets it forth in full as 
though it had happened, he may rest as- 
sured that his elaborative art is likely to 
64 



SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 

fail of achieving the successful result at- 
tained by Mr. Howells's skilful and tactful 
commingling of ingenious suggestion and 
playful irony. 

If the present writer may again call him- 
self as a witness, it will be to confess that 
in a certain little tale of his own, 'Love at 
First Sight,' containing only the conversa- 
tion at dinner of a pretty girl with a young 
author, he scattered broadcast three several 
suggestions for stories, — and that his rea- 
son for this reckless liberality was solely 
because these suggestions seemed to him 
more effective as mere suggestions than 
they would have been had he done his best 
to work them out conscientiously. One 
was only an alluring title, to which, how- 
ever, he had never been able to fit an 
appropriate plot: 'The Parrot that talked 
in his Sleep.' The second was the bare 
hint for a Hawthornesque sketch to be 
called 'At the End of his Tether,' and to 
describe how a collector of morbid taste 
brought together bits of the ropes with 
65 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

which notorious criminals had been hanged, 
only at the last to splice these together 
that he might hang himself. And the 
third, the 'Queen of the Living Chessmen,' 
was more fully developed, and the young 
writer of fiction was able to outline it to 
the pretty girl at dinner and to profit by 
her acute criticism. This third tale thus 
sketched out seemed to have dramatic pos- 
sibilities of its own — possibilities which so 
strongly impressed the editor of the maga- 
zine to which the manuscript was first sub- 
mitted, that he rejected 'Love at First 
Sight' with the remark that he would be 
glad to accept the 'Queen of the Living 
Chessmen' if the author would write that 
out as a story by Itself. 

Yet this is just what the author was too 
wary to attempt. He Is quite willing that 
it should be undertaken by another pen ; 
but he had his own reasons for believing 
that the notion had made Its full effect 
when it was presented merely as a notion. 
And It is his belief that the apparent gen- 



SEED-CORN FOR STORIES 

erosity of Mr. Howells and of Mr. Al- 
drich — and that of Poe also — when they 
gave away the themes for tales that they 
had invented and that they might have 
written themselves had they so chosen, v/as 
the result of a delicate perception of the 
fact that the bare theme itself is often as 
valuable as the fully clothed tale would be. 
The underlying principle which has gov- 
erned them is well stated by the younger 
Dumas in his account of the circumstances 
which led him to rewrite a play brought 
to him by Emile de Girardin, the 'Supplice 
d'une Femme.' 

Dumas declares that all he found in 
Girardin's play was a single and striking 
situation. "But a situation is not an idea," 
he explains. "An idea has a beginning, 
a middle and an end — an exposition, a 
development, and a conclusion. Anybody 
can happen on a dramatic situation ; but 
this must be prepared for, made acceptable, 
made possible, and above all, untied logi- 
cally." And then Dumas generously 
67 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

throws out the suggestion of a new and 
striking dramatic situation. "A young 
man asks the hand of a young woman. It 
is accorded to him. He marries her civilly 
and religiously; and at the very moment 
when he is about to take her away with 
him, he learns categorically that he has 
married his sister. That is a situation, 
Isn't it? and most Interesting! But find 
a way out of it! I give you a thousand 
guesses, — and I give you the situation If 
you want It. He who shall make a good 
play with this as his starting-point will be 
the veritable author of the piece, and I 
shall not urge my claim." 

It Is proof of Dumas's perfect under- 
standing of all the conditions of the drama- 
turgic art, that when two young French 
authors took him at his word and actually 
made a play out of this suggestion of his, 
the piece, although acted by the admirable 
company of the Odeon, was promptly dis- 
missed as Impossible. 
(1904). 

68 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 



A 



LTHOUGH most of the his- 
torians of American literature 
have acknowledged that humor 
is abundant in the writings of 
our authors, and that this humor is dis- 
tinctive and characteristic, having a quality 
of its own, easy enough to perceive, even 
if difficult to define, no one of these his- 
torians has as yet cared to consider at 
length the American contribution to that 
special form of humor which we call the 
satire in verse. 

Of this form the earliest masters were 
Horace and Juvenal, although it is still 
a matter of dispute which of the two was 
the more successful in this field. Dryden, 
who appreciated both of them, and who had 
found his profit in a shrewd analysis of 
69 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

their methods, held for the later Latin 
poet, declaring that "the sauce of Juvenal 
is more poignant to create in us an appetite 
of reading him." And then the robust 
British bard carried still further this culi- 
nary figure of speech, asserting that *'the 
meat of Horace is more nourishing; but 
the cookery of Juvenal more exquisite: so 
that, granting Horace to be the more gen- 
eral philosopher, we cannot deny that 
Juvenal was the greater poet — I mean In 
satire." 

It is In his learned and acute 'Discourse 
concerning the Origin and Progress of 
Satire' that Dryden records these opinions; 
and In this same essay, one of the richest 
and most m.asterful of his critical papers, 
he gives full mead of praise to the French 
critic whose Influence upon the satirists 
coming after him was almost as domina- 
ting as that of the earlier Roman practi- 
tioners of the art. "If I would only cross 
the seas," Dryden asserted, "I might find 
in France a living Horace and a Juvenal, 
70 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

in the person of the admirable Boileau; 
whose numbers are excellent, whose 
thoughts are just, whose language is pure, 
whose satire is pointed, and whose sense 
is close." Then the Englishman proceeded 
to pay to the Frenchman a compliment, 
which might well be bestowed on himself, 
saying that what Boileau "borrowed from 
the Ancients, he repays with usury of his 
own, in coin as good, and almost as uni- 
versally valuable." 

The obvious difference between the 
French satirist and his Roman predeces- 
sors is that they dealt with society at 
large, Horace gently laughing at the 
foibles of the hour, and Juvenal nobly 
scourging the deeper vices of his darker 
period, whereas Boileau was interested 
rather more in literature than in life, car- 
ing less for the diseases of the body politic 
than for lapses from the laws of taste and 
breaches of the rules of art. Here he was 
followed by Pope, who was far less fortu- 
nate in his choice of authors to attack. 
71 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

The judgment of posterity has confirmed 
most of the contemporary decisions of 
Boileau ; and the reputations he killed have 
stayed dead. Not so with Pope, who was 
ill-advised enough to choose as the heroes 
of his 'Dunciad,' Theobald and Colley 
Gibber, writers vulnerable enough, no 
doubt, but neither of them dunces by any 
possible extension of the word. Theobald, 
in fact, was one of the most intelligent of 
the earlier Shaksperian commentators; and 
Gibber, however absurd a figure he might 
make as poet-laureate, was the author not 
only of one of the most amusing autobi- 
ographies in the language, but also of at 
least one comedy which has survived on 
the stage for nearly two centuries. 

Just as one British compiler, Dodd, in 
his comprehensive collection of English 
epigrams, did not care to include any speci- 
mens of American wit, so another British 
editor of a recent anthology of 'English 
Satires,' Mr. Oliphant Smeaton, has failed 
to reproduce a single American example, 
72 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

although in his critical introduction he 
mentions more than one of our authors 
with casual compliment. It may be that 
Mr. Smeaton deliberately determined to 
ignore the American efforts in this depart- 
ment of literature; but it is far more likely 
that he was blandly ignorant of the value 
and of the variety of American satire in 
verse. In each of the three main divisions 
of this interesting department of literature, 
in the genial satire of society, of which 
Horace set the example, in the broader and 
bolder satire of contemporary politics, of 
which Juvenal has left the unapproachable 
model, and in the more personal and purely 
literary satire, of which Boileau and Pope 
have been accepted as masters, — in each of 
these three contiguous fields of literary en- 
deavor, American authors have adventured 
themselves with varying success. 

It is in the first of these three divisions, 

in the satire of society, glancing wittily at 

the men and the manners and the morals 

of the hour, that our American versifiers 

73 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

have advanced least frequently. Yet even 
in this form of satire the last half of the 
nineteenth century saw the publication of 
the late William Allen Butler's 'Nothing 
to Wear,' of Mr. Stedman's brisk and 
brilliant 'Diamond Wedding,' of Judge 
Grant's ingenious 'Little Tin Gods on 
Wheels,' and of the adroitly rhymed 'Bunt- 
ling Ball,' generally ascribed to the late 
Edgar Fawcett. In the first half of the cen- 
tury Halleck and Drake printed in a New 
York evening paper the series of lively 
lyrics which came to be known as the 
'Croaker Papers' — the collaborating au- 
thors having chosen to sign their smart 
rhymes with the name of a character in 
Goldsmith's 'Good-natured Man.' Unfor- 
tunately for the fame of the associated 
bards, their themes were very local and 
of little lasting importance, so that it is 
almost Impossible to copy here any of their 
clever verses without an apparatus of notes 
explaining the allusions. What is very 
contemporary is likely to be only tempo- 
74 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

rary; and the up-to-date is soon seen to 
be out-of-date. A joke Is no longer allur- 
ing when It demands a diagram In elucida- 
tion of its point. 

A few years after the 'Croaker Papers' 
had astonished and delighted all New 
York, there was published at least one 
formal satire of society, prepared in full 
acceptance of all the precedents which gov- 
ern a metrical attack on the follies and 
on the vices of the moment. This is 
'Gotham and the Gothamites. A Medley. 
New York: 1823. Published for the Au- 
thor.' For a New Yorker at the begin- 
ning of the twentieth century, loving this 
motley and mighty city of ours for what 
It is already and also for what it is to be 
in the future, there is not a little hardship 
in being forced to withhold high praise 
from a bard who set forth the pictorial 
charm of the town as it was four score 
years ago: 

Beautiful city ! like Venus from the deep, 
All glowing in her beauty, dost thou spring 

75 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

From out the waters, that murmuring creep 

Around thy island-throne, and proudly bring 
Unto thy footstool, all that gorgeous stream 

Of pomp — of wealth — of richer merchandise; 
The world's high homage ! Yea, and I have seen 

The mighty sun o'er thy tall spires arise, 
Pavillioned in his glory ; and no sight 

Was lovelier 

After this unexpected psan on the beau- 
ties of Manhattan, which are even now 
only grudgingly admitted, there is cause 
for sorrow in the later passages of the 
satire, scarcely any of which would reward 
quotation. Perhaps the best bit is that 
describing the degradation of the theatre, 
— for the "decline of the drama" is a topic 
for discussion as old as the playhouse itself : 

Such is the drama ; unbound, unrestrained, 
It has rushed down to earth, and regained 
The dust from which it rose; that which was art 
Approaching afifection, hath changed to low 
And rude burlesque, and coarse buffoonery. 
Which would to a wandering charlatan impart 
The blush of shame ; distortion and ribaldry 
Are on the -heek and lip of every fostered mime, 
Who famished, yet impudent, from distant clime 
Adventures, dead to disgrace and shame. 
76 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

These specimens must suffice to show 
that 'Gotham and the Gothamites' is pretty 
small beer, rather watery, and not likely 
to intoxicate with delight. It is in his 
notes in prose rather than in the verse of 
his text that the anonymous bard strives 
to awaken contempt for his contemporaries. 
But his pins are pointless, for the most 
part, and also headless. 

Perhaps it is among the social rather 
than among the literary satires that we 
must include the 'Trollopiad; or. Travel- 
ling Gentlemen in America. A Satire. By 
Nil Admirari, Esq. New York; 1837.' 
This indignant effusion was evoked by the 
swift succession of British books of travel 
in America — Mrs. Trollope's volumes, 
Captain Hall's account of his wanderings, 
and the 'Journal' of Mrs. Fanny Kemble 
— books now happily as little read as this 
metrical retort upon them. It was in the 
very first number of the 'Sketch Book' that 
Irving warned British writers against the 
danger of creating ill-feeling by constant 

n 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

abuse of a people who used the same lan- 
guage and who were likely in time to be- 
come the more important half of the race. 
His good advice had the usual fate of 
friendly warnings ; and a succession of trav- 
ellers from across the sea set forth in black 
and white their casual impressions of the 
people of These States, revealing some- 
times a contemptuous hostility and some- 
times that lordly condescension, the pleas- 
ure of which is notoriously one-sided. 

The versifier of the 'Trollopiad' was 
moved to wrath and called for the scourge 
of the satiric poet : 

POPE— GIFFORD— BYRON— what ! since ye are 

fled, 
Shall folly rage, and satire's self be dead? 
Must he who would the warning voice repeat, 
Breathe it in numbers exquisitely sweet? 
And pour on dunces' ears a tide of song, 
As Pope harmonious and as Dryden strong? 
Oh no ! my humbler muse will mark the foe, 
How ill so e'er the unwonted numbers flow. 
In this alone our fools are chang'd from those, — 
They scrawled in verse, these haply write in prose. 
They aimed at but a few their venom'd dart, 

78 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

These fain would stab a nation to the heart. 

Unscathed, unpunished by satiric pen, 

Dulness asserts her ancient right again : 

Her thousand children from her sceptre pass, 

Each braying loud, proclaims himself an ASS. 

The mother bids them venture and be bold. 

Where Freedom reigns, and streets are paved with 

gold. 
"Proceed, my sons, where TROLLOPE leads the 

way," 
"There one and all are sure to have their day." 

Perhaps the most quotable passage in 
this rather labored set of couplets is that 
in which the British visitor is brought face 
to face with the mightiest of our natural 
wonders : 

Arriv'd, at last, Niagara to scan. 
He walks erect and feels himself a man; 
Surveys the cataract with a "critic's eye," 
Resolv'd to pass no "imperfections by." 
Niag'ra, wonder of the Deity, 
Where God's own spirit reigns in majesty. 
With sullen roar the foaming billows sweep, 
A world of waters thunders o'er the steep : 
The unmingled colours laugh upon the spray. 
And one eternal rainbow gilds the day. 
Oh ! glorious God ! Oh ! scene surpassing all ! 
"True, true," quoth he, " 'tis something of a fall." 
Now, shall unpunibh'd such a vagrant band, 
79 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Pour like the plagues of Egypt on the land, 
Eyeing each fault, to all perfection blind. 
Shedding the taint of a malignant mind? 

No indelible lines divide social satire 
from literary satire on the one side and 
from political on the other; but it is per- 
haps closer to the latter than to the former. 
Rather toward political than toward social 
satire have American wits been more often 
attracted. No chapters in the late Pro- 
fessor Moses Coit Tyler's 'Literary His- 
tory of the American Revolution' are 
more interesting or more illuminating 
than those in which he considers the 
pungent verses of the rival bards who 
attacked the British cause, or who de- 
nounced the American, during the years 
that followed the breach with England. 
And it is to be noted that although the 
best known of all the Revolutionary satir- 
ists — Freneau especially, whom Tyler terms 
a "poet of hatred rather than of love" — 
were on the right side, yet the other party 
was not without its share of rhymesters, 
80 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

having an apt command of epigram and an 
ample supply of invective. For example, 
Dr. Jonathan Odell, who served as chaplain 
to the Loyalist troops, published in 1779 
and 1780 four brief satires which have 
pith and point, and even a certain individu- 
ality of their own, although obviously imi- 
tating the method and the manner of Dry- 
den and of Pope. There is vigor in these 
verses : 

Was Samuel Adams to become a ghost, 
Another Adams would assume his post; 
Was bustling Hancock numbered with the dead, 
Another full as wise might raise his head. 
What if the sands of Laurens now were run, 
How should we miss him — has he not a son? 
Or what if Washington should close his scene, 
Could none succeed him? Is there not a Greene? 
Knave after knave as easy could we join, 
As new emissions of the paper coin. 

But nothing produced on the Tory side 
has half the broad humor and the pertinent 
wit of Trumbull's 'McFingal,' published in 
part in 1776 and completed in 1782. 
Trumbull's immediate model is obviously 
'Hudibras;' but he had found his profit in 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

a study of Churchill as well as of Butler. 
Yet 'McFingal' is no mere imitation; or 
else it would have gone the swift way of 
all other imitations. As Professor Trent 
has justly remarked, Trumbull's mock epic 
"shows a wide and digested knowledge of 
the classics and of the better British poets; 
and while it lacks the variety and inexhaust- 
ible wit of Butler's performance, it is in 
many passages hardly inferior to that in 
pointedness and in its command of the 
Hudibrastic verse-form." In the minting 
of couplets destined to proverbial currency, 
Trumbull has often the felicity of Butler; 
and some of his sayings have had the 
strange fortune of ascription to the satire 
upon which his was modeled. For example : 

No man e'er felt the halter draw 
With good opinion of the law. 

and again, 

But optics sharp it needs, I wean, 
To see what is not to be seen. 

Trumbull has also not a little of Butler's 
82 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

daring ingenuity in the devising of novel 
rhymes : 

Behold ! the world shall stare at new sets 
Of home-made ears in Massachusetts. 

After the Revolution, and before the 
constitution gave to the scarcely United 
States the firm government which the na- 
tion needed, during what the late John 
Fiske aptly called "the critical period of 
American history," Trumbull joined with 
others of the little group known as the 
"Hartford Wits" in a satire called the 
'Anarchiad,' published in 1786-87, in which 
faction was denounced in scathing terms : 

Stand forth, ye traitors, at your country's bar, 
Inglorious authors of intestine war, 
What countless mischiefs from their labors rise! 
Pens dipped in gall, and lips inspired with lies ! 
Ye sires of ruin, prime detested cause 
Of bankrupt faith, annihilated laws. 
Of selfish systems, jealous, local schemes, 
And unvoiced empire lost in empty dreams ; 
Your names, expanding with your growing crime, 
Shall float disgustful down the stream of time; 
Each future age applaud the avenging song. 
An outraged nature vindicate the wrong. 

83 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

All things considered, the most amusing 
political effort in this field between the 
Revolution and the War of 1812, was the 
'Embargo; or, Sketches of the Times. A 
Satire by a Youth of Thirteen; Boston, 
1808. Printed for the purchasers.' This 
met with so much success that it was issued 
in a second edition in the following year. 
The youth of thirteen survived to be the 
boy of eighteen, who wrote 'Thanatopsis,' 
and who was the earliest American poet to 
transmute into his verse the beauty of nature 
here in America. Bryant lived to be not 
a little annoyed when he was reminded of 
his youthful indiscretion, for with the flight 
of time he outgrew the political opinions 
he had taken over from his father and 
from his father's Federalist friends. Bry- 
ant came to have a high regard for the 
character and for the public services and 
even for most of the political theories of 
the Jefferson whom the youth of thirteen 
had ignorantly berated : 



84 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

And thou the scorn of every patriot's name 
Thy country's ruin and thy council's shame! 
Poor servile thing! derision of the brave! 
Who erst from Tarlcton lied to Carter's Cave; 
Thou who when menaced by perfidious Gaul, 
Did'st prostrate to her whisker'd minions fall ; 
And when our cash her empty bags supplied 
Did'st meanly strive the foul disgrace to hide ; 
Go, wretch, resign the Presidential chair, 
Disclose thy secret measures, foul or fair. 
Go search with curious eye for horrid frogs 
Mid the wild wastes of Louisianian bogs; 
Or where the Ohio rolls his turbid stream. 
Dig for huge bones, thy glory and thy theme. 
Go scan, Philosophist, thy Sally's charms, 
And sink supinely in her sable arms; 
But quit to abler hands the helm of State. 

Beyond all question the best American 
political satire Is Lowell's 'Biglow Papers,' 
the first series being written during the 
Mexican War and the second during the 
Civil War. Although either series may 
seem fragmentary, each has a real unity 
of its own; the aim and intent Is ever the 
same. And the unforgettable figure of 
Hosea Biglow dominates both sets of 
satiric lyrics. Lowell was at once a Puri- 
85 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

tan by descent, a poet by gift of nature, 
and a wit by stroke of fate; and in the 
'Biglow Papers' we have revealed the Puri- 
tan poet who could not help being witty. 
He could not help preaching, for as he 
said "all New England was a meeting- 
house" when he was young; and a satirist 
must be a preacher in his own way. He 
had enlisted for the war, and he was ever 
fighting the good fight. His heart was 
in his cause; and his desire to help it along, 
made him conquer the indolence which so 
often prevented his doing his best as a 
poet. Lowell tended to improvise, to 
brood long over a theme, and then to pour 
out his lines in a sudden burst of inspiration, 
not always taking the trouble afterward to 
revise and to refine, to finish and to polish, 
and to make the most of his genius. It 
is this which accounts for the inequality 
of his odes. But when he was at work on 
the 'Biglow Papers' he wanted to bring 
his message home, and he waited until he 
had found a taking rhythm and a refrain 
86 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

that would sing Itself Into the memory. 
And so we cannot forget, even if we would, 
that 

John P 
Robinson, he 
Sez he won't vote for Guvnor B. 

and that 

Ole Uncle S, sez he, "I guess 

It is a fact," sez he, 
"The surest plan to make a man 

Is, think him so, J. B. 
Ez much ez you or me!" 

Here, as so often in the history of all 
the arts, we see that the artist has profited 
by his willingness to take time and trouble, 
and by his honesty in resolutely grappling 
with difficulty. The two refrains quoted 
above are, one of them from the first series, 
and the other from the second; and this 
reminds us that Lowell succeeded as well 
the second time he chose Hosea Biglow 
for his mouthpiece, as he did the first time, 
although in literature a sequel is generally 
87 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

a feeble thing, a faint imitation of its more 
vigorous elder brother. The motive that 
impelled the poet was even stronger dur- 
ing the Civil War than it had been fifteen 
years earlier; and the wit was no less keen 
nor the humor less contagious. That 
Heaven is on the side of the heaviest bat- 
talions, is an old saying, and almost equally 
venerable is the belief that it is generally 
the losing cause which inspires the poet and 
also the satirist. Certainly Aristophanes 
seems to us now to have been on the wrong 
side in the 'Clouds' and in the 'Knights;' 
and Butler in his 'Hudibras' was making 
fun of the stern Puritan who had enough 
iron in his blood to win the victory at last. 
But here in the United States we have been 
more fortunate. Clever as were some of 
the Tory wits, the one satire of the Revo- 
lution which can still be read with pleasure, 
is the 'McFingal' of the more patriotic 
Trumbull; and in the Civil War nothing 
produced in the South can withstand com- 
parison with the 'Biglow Papers.' 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

In the third division of satire, the purely 
literary, we find Lowell again the chief fig- 
ure with the 'Fable for Critics,' published 
in 1848, the same year that he sent forth 
the first series of the 'Biglow Papers' and 
also the more purely poetic 'Vision of Sir 
Launfal.' But the 'Fable for Critics' was 
preceded by another formal and elaborate 
attempt at literary satire, called 'Truth,' 
published in 1832; and it was followed 
by yet another entitled 'Parnassus in Pil- 
lory,' issued in 1851. Neither of these 
attains to the level of Lowell's brilliant skit; 
and they soon faded out of remembrance. 
Yet each of them has an interest of its 
own, and calls for cursory consideration 
here. 

'Truth, a Gift for Scribblers,' by Wil- 
liam J. Snclling, seems to have achieved 
a certain success, sufficient at least to cause 
it to be reprinted, — since it is a second 
edition "with additions and emendations" 
that I now have before me. Mr. Snelling 
tells us how he heard 

89 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

a voice that cries, "Lift up thine hand 
Against the legions of this locust band ; 
Let brain-sick youths the wholesome scourge endure ; 
Their case is urgent. Spare not ! Kill or cure ! 
Hang, hang them up, like smelts upon a string, 
And o'er their books a requicscat sing: 
Arise ! — convince thy country of her shame ; 
Rise, ere her genius be no more a name ! 

Rous'd by the call of Duty, I obey; 

I draw the sword, and fling the sheath away. 

And with the blade thus drawn, Mr. 
Snelling runs amuck amid the minor Amer- 
ican authors of his day, hewing and hack- 
ing, and yet not revealing any gift of 
swordsmanship which would let him wound 
with a sharp epithet or kill with a piercing 
couplet. Here is a sample of his execution 
wrought upon the once-popular N. P. 
Willis: 

Muse, shall we not a few brief lines afford 
To give poor Natty P. — his meet reward? 
What has he done to be despised by all 
Within whose hands his harmless scribblings fall? 
Why, as in band-box trim, he walks the streets, 
Turns up the nose of every man he meets, 
As if it scented carrion? Why, of late. 
Do all the critics claw his shallow pate? 
90 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

From a note In this second edition, 
it appears that Willis had retorted with an 
unworthy attempt at an epigram, to which 
Snelling retaliated with three several efforts 
of his own, not quite so gross as Willis's, 
but far feebler. A man of taste often finds 
it needful to hold his nose as he reads the 
lines of the less inspired satirists; and as 
to the reasons for this he had best hold 
his tongue forever after. Far more agree- 
able is it to quote Snelling's eulogy of Fitz- 
Greene Halleck, whose fame is now sadly 
faded : 

Dear Halleck, wither'd be the hands that dare 
One laurel from thy nobler brow to tear ; 
Accept the tribute of a muse inclin'd 
To bow to nothing, save the power of mind. 
Bard of Bozzaris, shall thy native shore 
List to thy harp and mellow voice no more? 
Shall we, with skill like thine so near at hand, 
Import our music from a foreign land? 
While Mirror Morris chants in whimpering note, 
And croaking Dana strains his screech-owl throat; 
While crazy Neal to metre shakes his chains. 
And fools are found to listen to his strains, 
Wilt thou be silent? Wake, O Halleck, wake! 

91 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Thine and thy country's honor are at stake; 
Wake, and redeem the pledge ; thy vantage keep ; 
While Paulding wakes and writes, shall Halleck 
sleep ? 

Snelling has words of praise also for 
Bryant; but he falls foul of Whittier; and 
he delights in abuse of the first efforts of 
the native American dramatists, especially 
deriding Stone, who had just devised 'Meta- 
mora' for the robust talents of Edwin 
Forrest. 

It was not Snelling's forgotten 'Truth' 
which evoked the next and the best of 
American literary satires — the only one 
indeed which has a permanent value. The 
immediate cause of the 'Fable for Critics' 
seems to have been Leigh Hunt's 'Feast 
of the Poets,' although the influence of 
Goldsmith's 'Retaliation' is also apparent. 
Indeed, It is only in 'Retaliation' that we 
can find a gallery of lightly limned contem- 
porary portraits worthy of comparison with 
the collection contained In the 'Fable.' Per- 
fect as Is Goldsmith's portrayal of Burke 
92 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

and Reynolds and Garrick, it is not finer 
or truer than Lowell's depicting of Irving 
or of Cooper, or than the companion pic- 
tures of Emerson and Carlyle. In his affec- 
tionate essay on Dryden, Lowell quotes 
Dryden's assertion that Chaucer was "a 
perpetual fountain of good sense," only to 
suggest that the phrase may be applied to 
Dryden himself; it fits the American critic- 
poet almost as well as the British poet- 
critic. Half a century is it since Lowell 
narrated his 'Fable;' and even at this late 
date his criticism seems to us to be rarely 
at fault. 

Not only did he set forth fifty years 
ago an opinion of his contemporaries antici- 
pating the judgment of the twentieth cen- 
tury, but he chose with unerring instinct 
the writers whom it was worth while to 
consider. Here is the weak spot of most 
literary satires; they deal with the dead 
already; they slay the petty critics and 
minor poets certain to die of their own 
accord, and to be forgotten in a flash. This 
93 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

is what makes the 'Dunclad' unreadable 
nowadays except by indefatigable students 
of the period. Pope gratified his spite 
against the criticasters and the poetasters, 
victims really unworthy of his wit; and as 
a result his lines are now read only by those 
attracted by his fame. His theme is not to- 
day tempting to the general reader, and the 
resolute perusal of the 'Dunciad' demands 
both courage and endurance. But the 
'Fable for Critics' is alluring not only to 
admirers of Lowell, but to all having an 
interest in the group of American men of 
letters who adorned the middle of the nine- 
teenth century. 

Of course there are those who hold that 
the machinery of the fable creaks a little, 
that the rattling rhymes run away with the 
lyrist more than once, that the rhythm is 
somewhat rugged now and again, that the 
puns are not always as expensive as they 
might be, that there are other blemishes to 
be detected by a severe critic. But ever 
against these trifling defects set the brilliant 
94 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

truth of the characters of Hawthorne and 
Holmes and Whittier. Consider, for ex- 
ample, the cleverness of the portrait of 
Poe, and note that the sketch is really 
just, In spite of the crackling of epigram : 

There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby 

Rudge, 
Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer 

fudge. 
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, 
In a way to make people of common sense damn 

metres, 
Who has written some things quite the best of their 

kind, 
But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by 

the mind, . . . 

And the sketch of Bryant, with all the 
Ingenuity of Its punning and all the arti- 
ficiality of its rhyming, is not a caricature 
but a true portrait: 

There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified, 
As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified. 
Save when the reflection 'tis kindled o' nights 
With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern 

Lights. 
He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your 

nation 

95 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

(There's no doubt that he stands in supreme ice- 

olation), 
Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on, 
But no warm applauses come, peal following peal 

on, — 
He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal 

on: 
Unqualified merits, I'll grant, if you choose, he has 

'em, 
But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm; 
If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul. 
Like being stirred up with the very North Pole. 

He is very nice reading in summer, but inter 

Nos, we don't want extra freezing in winter; 

Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is, 

When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices. 

But, deduct all you can, there's enough that's right 
good in him, 

He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him ; 

And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, or 
where'er it is, 

Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest chari- 
ties. 

If a properly annotated edition of the 
'Fable for Critics' should ever be published, 
— and it would be warmly welcomed by all 
students of American literature — the editor 
will call attention to Lowell's own opinion 
96 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

of this passage, expressed in one of his let- 
ters. He declared that his criticism of 
Bryant was "funny and as fair as I could 
make it, immitigably just. Indeed, I have 
endeavored to be so in all." The friend 
to whom he was writing had informed 
Lowell that Bryant seemed to think that 
the younger poet had been borrowing from 
him. It is to this that Lowell was refer- 
ring when he continued, "I am glad I did 
Bryant before I got your letter .... 
/ steal from him indeed ! If he knew me he 
would not say so. When I steal I shall 
go to a specie-vault, not to a till." 

Although he was dealing solely with the 
literature of his own country, Lowell had 
ever a cosmopolitan point of view, while 
still keeping his feet firm on his native soil. 
He was never either provincial in self-asser- 
tion or colonial in self-abasement. No one 
had higher ideals for America; and no one 
was prompter to see the absurdity of hasty 
assertions that these ideals had already been 
attained. He refused resolutely to see a 
97 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Swan of Avon in any of our wild geese. 
He laughed to scorn the suggestion that 
we ought to have great poets of our own 
merely because of the vastness of the coun- 
try. He had a healthy detestation of that 
confession of inferiority which consists in 
calling Irving the "American Goldsmith," 
and Cooper the "American Scott." It was 
this youthful foible — feebler now than it 
was when the 'Fable' was written, but not 
yet quite dead — that Lowell girded against 
in one of his most brilliant passages : 

By the wav, 'tis a fact that displays what profusions 
Of ail kinds of greatness bless free institutions, 
That while the Old World has produced barely eight 
Of such poets as all men agree to call great, 
And of other great characters hardly a score 
(One might safely say less than that rather than 

more), 
With you every year a whole crop is begotten. 
They're as much of a staple as corn is, or cotton ; 
Why, there's scarcely a huddle of log-huts and 

shanties 
That has not brought forth its own Miltons and 

Dantes ; 
I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three 

Shelleys, 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

Two Raphaels, six Titians, (I think) one Apelles, 
Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens. 
One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens, 
A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons, — 
In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons, 
He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain 
Will be some very great person over again. 

This same foible we find animadverted 
upon again in 'Parnassus in Pillory. A 
Satire. By Motley Manners, Esquire. 
New York: 1851.' The anonymous bard, 
now known to be A. J. H. Duganne, be- 
moaned the sad plight of his own country: 

Oh, hapless land of mine ! whose country-presses 
Labor with poets and with poetesses ; 
Where Helicon is quaffed like beer at table, 
And Pegasus is "hitched" in every stable ; 
Where each smart dunce presumes to print a journal, 
And every journalist is dubbed a "colonel ;" 
Where love-sick girls on chalk and water thrive, 
And prove, by singing, they're unfit to wive ; 
Where Gray might Miltons by the score compute — 
"Inglorious" all, but, ah ! by no means "mute." 

And there is sense as well as vigor in 
his denunciation of that colonial attitude 

99 



l ofC. 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

of so many Americans in the days before 
the Civil War had made us somewhat less 
self-conscious : 

The British critics — be it to their glory, 

When they abuse us, do it con aniore; 

There's no half-way about your bulldog pure. 

And there's no nonsense with your "Scotch reviewer." 

Heaven knows how often we've been whipped like 

curs. 
By those to whom we've knelt as worshippers ; 
Heaven only knows how oft, like froward chitlings, 
Our authors have been snubbed by British witlings; 
Our mountains ranked as mole-hills — our immense 
And awful forests styled "Virginny fence;" 
Our virtues all but damned with faintest praise, 
And our faults blazoned to the widest gaze! 
I find no fault with them — they praise us rarely; 
As for abuse — we're open to it fairly ; 
But faith, it galls me, and I'll not deny it. 
To mark our own most de5erential quiet ; 
To note the whining, deprecative air 
With which we beg for praise, or censure bear; 
Shrink back in terror if our gifts they spurn, 
And if they smite one cheek, the other turn ; — 
Begging that they'll excuse a patient dunce. 
Who, if he could, would offer both at once. 

Perhaps as good as any of the portraits 
in 'Parnassus in Pillory' is this of Lowell: 

100 



AMERICAN SATIRES IN VERSE 

O, LOWELL ! now sententious — now most wordy — 
Thy harp Cremona half — half hurdy-gurdy; 
Wouldst thou arise, and climb the steeps of heaven? 
Sandals and staff are for thy journey given; 
Wouldst thou embrace the poet-preacher's lot? 
Nor purse nor scrip will lift thy steps a jot! 
Forth on the highways of the general mind, 
Thy soul must walk, in oneness with mankind. 
Thou hast done well, but thou canst yet do better, 
And winning credit, make the world thy debtor ; 
Pour out thy heart — albeit with flaws and fractures : 
Give us thyself — no "Lowell manufactures." 

The past fifty years have not called forth 
another formal satire of contemporary lit- 
erature, although the need is as acute now 
as it ever was, and although the public relish 
for ill-natured remarks is as keen as ever. 
Probably one reason why the longer satire 
in verse does not make its appearance is 
because the immense multiplication of peri- 
odicals, weekly and monthly, affords to the 
intending satirist a chance to shoot his 
shafts one by one in the papers without 
having to save them up for discharge in a 
volley and in a volume. Thus it was that 
the late H. C. Bunner — a cordial lover of 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

poetry, with a trained craftsman's appre- 
ciation of technic, with a keen sense of 
humor and with a singular gift of parody, 
— put forth his satires week by week in the 
paper he had conducted with prosperity. 
He evoked the figure of V. Hugo Dusen- 
bury, a professional poet, understanding 
all branches of the business, and ready to 
supply any kind of verse on demand, in 
quantities to suit the customer. If some 
future enthusiast shall ransack the files of 
Puck to edit the 'Life and Literary Remains 
of V. Hugo Dusenbury,' a younger genera- 
tion of readers will be enabled to make the 
acquaintance of an original character 
sketched with journalistic breadth and free- 
dom, but not really caricatured beyond re- 
semblance. And the poems which this pro- 
fessional poet produced by request and to 
meet the market, are parodies, most of 
them, or rather sympathetic imitations, 
satiric enough at times, appreciative often, 

and never malignant. 
(1904). 



VI 

AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

IN the elaborate and scholarly intro- 
duction to Mr. Dodd's comprehen- 
sive collection of the 'Epigram- 
matists' may be found an amusing 
illustration of the inability of a man 
of letters to accept the obvious fact that 
language is made in the street as well 
as in the study, and that in common usage 
the meaning of a word may broaden de- 
spite the utmost endeavor of precisians to 
keep it restricted. A word has the mean- 
ing which the plain people give it; and the 
trained and careful student of speech must 
kick in vain against the modifications of 
meaning which take place in spite of his 
protests. Mr. Dodd insists that the word 
epigram, being taken over from the Greek, 
must preserve in English exactly the sig- 
103 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

nificance that it had in the language from 
which we have derived it. In Greek epi- 
gram, epigraph and epitaph have substan- 
tially the same meaning; and all three 
words were applied to brief lyrics elevated 
in thought and having the lapidary con- 
cision of an inscription. In Latin, Martial 
debased the epigram; and in his hands 
it is a metrical phrasing of an ingenious 
point or of a keen retort. It is Martial 
whom the epigrammatists of the modern 
languages have taken as their master; and 
therefore in English the primary meaning 
of epigram is no longer a tiny lyric, lofty 
in sentiment, and graceful in phrasing; it 
is more an ingeniously turned witticism 
adroitly rhymed. 

Landor, who might almost be called a 
belated Athenian, declared that one of 
his own brief pieces "resembles not those 
ridiculous quibbles which the English in 
particular call epigrams, but rather . . . 
those exquisite eidylUa, which are modestly 
called epigrams by the Greeks." And 
104 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

Mr. Dodd insists again and again that 
there is no such thing as an epigram unless 
it follows the Greek model. That the 
English word epigram still retains this 
special meaning may perhaps be admitted, 
but this is no longer its only meaning, — 
or even its accepted meaning; and any 
writer who uses language as a means of 
communicating his thought to the main 
body of his readers, and who desires to be 
understood by them, will do well to find 
some other word to describe the epigram 
of the purest Greek type, and will accept 
the fact that in ordinary every-day English 
epigram now evokes the idea of a brilliant 
witticism. The common usage of the word 
nowadays is revealed by the frequent de- 
scription of the dialogue of Congreve and 
Sheridan as epigrammatic. 

It is not that English literature is defi- 
cient in brief poems having the special 
qualities that we find in the Greek epigram. 
Even in the 'Greek Anthology' it would be 
difficult to discover a poem more delicately 
105 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

felicitous than the epitaph on the Countess 
of Pembroke : 

Underneath this sable hearse 
Lies the subject of all verse, 
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother; 
Death, ere thou hast slain another 
Learn'd and fair and good as she 
Time shall throw a dart at thee. 

And it would not be an arduous task to 
collect other instances where the poets of 
our language have rivalled the austere per- 
fection of the Greek. But none the less 
has epigram come to indicate to us not a 
votive tablet but a sparkling retort. Per- 
haps the best definition of what we moderns 
understand by an epigram is contained in 
one which is ascribed by some to an un- 
known Latin writer and by others to the 
Spanish fabulist, Yriarte: 

The qualities all in a bee that we meet, 

In an epigram never should fail ; 
The body should always be little and sweet, 

And a sting should be felt in its tail. 

This is at once a description and an illus- 
tration; and to be set by the side of it is 
io6 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

an even terser attempt by an anonymous 
wit: 

What is an epigram? a dwarfish whole, 
Its body brevity, and wit its soul. 

One of these is Latin or Spanish and the 
other is British ; and to them may be added 
a third by an American, Mr. George 
Birdseye : 

The diamond's virtues well might grace 

The epigram, and both excel 
In brilliancy in smallest space, 

And power to cut. as well. 

Although we no longer demand in an 
epigram the ancient ingenuity of sentiment, 
preferring the modern wit that seeks to 
surprise, we ought not to debase the stand- 
ard and to accept as a true epigram merely 
a rhymed pun or a versified anecdote. Mr. 
Dodd has quoted, from the preface of a 
collection published in London in 1735, 
a protest against these inexpressive rhymes, 
which hope to pass themselves off for epi- 
grams: "We have already observed what 
a gay conceit, or a good sentence, will some- 
107 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

times serve for points: but what else? 
Nothing so properly as what can truly be 
called wit; no jingle of words, pun, quibble, 
conundrum, mixed wit, or false wit, ought 
ever to be used, though they have all very 
often appeared in this kind of poetry." 

A rhymed pun, it is true, may some- 
times have a certain unexpected felicity 
which is its own excuse for being. Here 
is a couplet by an American rhymester — 
who in these papers must remain anony- 
mous — on the 'Danse Macabre' of M. 
Saint-Saens : 

This dance of death, which sounds so musically, 
Was sure intended for the corpse de ballet. 

And this couplet may be matched by a 
quatrain, written by Mrs. Lydia Maria 
Child a half century earlier when a young 
friend of hers named Nathaniel Deering 
moved his residence to the town of Canaan : 

Whoever weds the young lawyer at C. 

Will surely have prospects most cheering, 
For what must his person and intellect be, 

When even his name is "N. Deering?" 
io8 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

Even the versified anecdote may attain 
the requisite pithiness of the true epigram 
as we now understand the term; and per- 
haps as good an example as any that might 
be chosen is John Boyle O'Reilly's on the 
'Lure' : 

"What bait do you use," said a saint to the devil, 

"When you fish where the souls of men abound?" 
"Well, for special tastes," said the king of evil, 

"Gold and fame are the best I've found." 
"But for general use?" asked the saint. "Ah, then," 
Said the demon, "I angle for man, not men, 
And a thing I hate, 
Is to change my bait, 
So I fish with a woman the whole year round." 

But the mere pun in rhyme and the bare 
anecdote in verse, frequent as they both 
are, belong to an inferior order of effort. 
The true epigram is not often based on a 
pun, which has been called the lowest form 
of wit — because, as a punster explained, 
It is the foundation of all wit. And the 
true epigram does not need to be sustained 
by a story. The true epigram indeed re- 
lies on its own wit and It flies aloft on the 
109 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

twin wings of buoyancy and brilliancy — 
and here is its close resemblance to familiar 
verse, as Cowper called it, to vers de 
societe, as it is more often entitled. 

It is a curious fact that Mr. Dodd's 
collection of epigrams, which he sought to 
make as comprehensive as possible and 
which must contain two or three thousand 
specimens from almost every literature 
ancient and modern, does not include a 
single exan.ple by an American author. 
And it is almost equally curious that no 
American editor has as yet attempted to 
gather together an adequate representation 
of the epigrams of American authorship. 
This species of poetry seems to call for 
wit rather than humor; and the American 
gift is rather for humor than for wit. And 
yet there is no lack of epigrams of Amer- 
ican authorship, of varying merit, no doubt, 
but permitting a selection not unworthy 
of comparison with what has been done 
of late years, either by our kin across the 
sea In Great Britain, or by the satiric poets 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

of France. Many of the turning points 
of American history have found record 
in the couplets and quatrains of the Ameri- 
can epigrammatists. 

For example, it happened that the motto 
on the colors of the Hessians who were 
defeated at Trenton was Nescit Pericula, 
and as their behavior on this occasion was 
not over-valiant, an American carelessly 
rhymed this uncomplimentary quatrain : 

The man who submits without striking a blow, 
May be said in a sense no danger to know : 
I pray then, what harm, by the humble submission. 
At Trenton was done by the standard of Hessian. 

Another Revolutionary epigram was 
probably written by David Edwards not 
long after the event it commemorates, 
Burgoyne's surrender: 

Burgoyne, alas, unknowing future fates, 
Could force his way through woods, but not through 
Gates. 

The neatness of the pun was probably 
appreciated by the debonair British gen- 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

eral whose own wit was displayed in the 
comedy of the 'Heiress,' which held the 
stage for several years in England. It 
was the surrender of Burgoyne which en- 
couraged the French to come to our aid; 
and it was the French alliance which 
brought more swiftly the independence of 
this country and the establishment of a 
stable government on the basis of human 
equality. The most important implement 
of any such government must be the ballot; 
and no one attempting to collect the most 
striking of American epigrams could afford 
to omit the quatrain of the Reverend John 
Pierpont on the 'Ballot' : 

A weapon that comes down as still 
As snowflakes fall upon the sod; 

But executes a freeman's will, 

As lightning does the will of God. 

The Civil War brought forth a fruitage 
of epigrams as abundant as that of the 
Revolution; and of these one of the earli- 
est was written when Admiral Foote was 
engaged in clearing the Mississippi: 

112 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

The rebels say, in boasting way, 
They'll every inch of ground dispute; 

A brag, indeed, we'll better heed 
Whenever they withstand one Foote. 

The mock epitaph has always been a 
favorite form of epigram, and sometimes 
a real epitaph may have an epigrammatic 
flavor. When the Union troops withdrew 
after one of the battles in front of Rich- 
mond, a Confederate soldier is said to have 
buried a dead opponent and to have written 
on a shingle stuck at the head of the grave 
these rather grewsome lines: 

The Yankee hosts with blood-stained hands 
Came southward to divide our lands. 
This narrow and contracted spot 
Is all that this poor Yankee got. 

After the capture of the President of the 
Confederacy, Charles G, Halpine, who was 
better known as "Miles O'Reilly," put into 
circulation a fragment of verse which he 
called 'An Old Maxim Reversed' : 

Et arma ccdunt toga, 

Said a Roman of renown: 
When the din of war is over, 

Arms yield unto the gown. 

113 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

But this motto Jeff reverses : 
For, arrayed in female charms, 

When the din of war is over, 
In his gown he yields to arms. 

After the war came the dread period 
of Reconstruction, followed by the sorrow- 
ful days of brutal ring rule in New York 
and in Boston. It was probably Tweed 
of New York, whose brazen career evoked 
from Lowell a biting couplet on the 'Boss' : 

Skilled to pull wires, he baflfles Nature's hope, 
Who sure intended him to stretch a rope. 

And it was probably Butler of Massa- 
chusetts who called forth a scorching qua- 
train which Lowell liked enough to include 
in his latest volume of verse, and which 
he termed a 'Misconception' : 

B. taught by Pope to do his good by stealth, 
'Twixt participle and noun no difference feeling; 

In office placed to serve the Commonwealth, 
Does himself all the good he can by stealing. 

During the long labors of the American 
Copyright League to secure such an amend- 
ment to our laws which would give foreign 
114 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

authors an honest reward for their work 
while relieving American writers from an 
enforced competition with stolen goods, 
Lowell served as President, and he lived 
only a few months after the law went into 
effect which he had helped to pass. To 
aid in arousing the popular conscience 
against the sin of literary piracy he wrote 
an epigram, which the League immediately 
took for its motto: 

In vain we call old notions fudge, 
And bend our conscience to our dealing; 

The ten commandments will not budge, 
And stealing will continue stealing. 

Another epigram of Lowell's, written on 
his sixty-eighth birthday, falls within the 
later definition of the epigram, while it 
lies at ease also within the earlier definition, 
which Insists rather on a serenity such as 
we look for in a Greek inscription : 

As life runs on, the road grows strange 
With faces new, and near the end 

The milestones into headstones change, 
'Neath everyone a friend. 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

With this austere quatrain of Lowell's 
may be contrasted another by Emerson, 
written originally in an album : 

The man who has a thousand friends 

Has not a friend to spare; 
But he who has one enemy 

Will meet him everywhere. 

In one of his letters Lowell describes 
a dull dinner in London with a dozen and 
a half speakers droning away till long after 
midnight, the only brilliant exception being 
Sir Frederick Bramwell, who was called 
upon very late to respond to Applied Sci- 
ence, and who said that "at this time of 
night the only illustration of the toast I 
can think of would be the application of 
the domestic safety-match to the bed-room 
candle." Whereupon Lowell promptly 
handed him this impromptu, scribbled 
on a card: 

Oh, brief Sir Frederick, might the others catch 
Your happy science, — and supply your match ! 

This couplet of Lowell's improvised at 
ii6 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

a dinner may be followed by a quatrain 
of Longfellow's improvised in an inn- 
album. At the Sign of the Raven in Zurich 
Longfellow was overcharged for unsatis- 
factory accommodation ; and he contributed 
to the landlord's book these four lines of 
warning to other travellers : 

Beware of the Raven of Zurich, 

'Tis a bird of omen ill, 
With an ugly, unclean nest 

And a very, very long bill. 

Another of Longfellow's playful and 
careless quatrains has also been preserved: 

When you ask one friend to dine, 
Give him your best wine ! 
When you ask two, 
The second best will do ! 

It is to Martial that we can trace the 
turning aside of the epigram from senti- 
ment to wit; and in his hands the epigram 
may pierce like the keenest of rapiers or 
it may batter like a brutal bludgeon. He 
is willing to employ either weapon against 
117 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

the sex he was at once pursuing and abus- 
ing. Woman, indeed, has always been a 
shining mark for the hurtling shafts of 
the epigrammatists of all countries. It was 
Fitz Greene Halleck, who adapted from 
Goethe a sarcastic quatrain, which he 
called 'Honor to Woman' : 

All honor to Woman, the Sweetheart, the Wife, 
The delight of our homesteads by night and by day, 

The darling who never does harm in her life, — 
Except when determined to have her own way. 

Several of the epigrams of John G. Saxe 
are directed against feminine failings. Just 
now, when so many women affect to be 
mannish, there is perhaps a certain perti- 
nence in the pair of couplets he called 
a 'Dilemma' : 

"Whenever I marry," says masculine Ann, 
"I must really insist upon wedding a man!" 
But what if the man (for men are but human) 
Should be equally nice about wedding a woman? 

Another of Saxe's is rather a rhymed 
retort than a true epigram; and it has the 
ii8 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

further disadvantage of recalling a little 
too closely one of the cleverest repartees 
in the 'School for Scandal.' Yet it is so 
neatly turned that it deserves quotation 
here. It is called 'Too Candid by Half : 

As Tom and his wife were discoursing one day 
Of their several faults in a bantering way, 

Said she : "Though my wit you disparage, 
I'm sure, my dear husband, our friends will attest 
This much, at the least, that my judgment is best." 

Quoth Tom, "So they said at our marriage." 

One of the most striking epigrams about 
women was written by a woman — the late 
Anne Reeve Aldrich, who gave her lines the 
enigmatic title, 'Suppose' : 

How sad if, by some strange new law, 

All kisses scarred ! 
For she who is most beautiful 

Would be most marred. 
And we might be surprised to see 

Some lovely wife 
Smooth-visaged, while a seeming prude 

Was marked for life. 

Another woman, Miss Mary AInge De 
119 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Vere, has put a certain feminine subtlety 
into her 'Friend and Lover' : 

When Psyche's friend becomes her lover, 
How sweetly these conditions blend ! 

But, oh, what anguish to discover 
Her lover has become — her friend ! 

But it was a man, Mr. Gordon Campbell, 
who phrased an opinion more masculine 
in the quatrain which he termed 'My Idol' : 

My idol fell down and was utterly broken, 

The fragments of stone lay all scattered apart; 
And I picked up the hardest to keep as a token — 

Her heart. 

It was a man again, Mr. W. D. Howells, 
who wrote this quatrain on 'A Sarcastic 
Woman' : 

Her mouth is a honey-blossom, 
No doubt, as the poet sings ; 

But within her lips, the petals, 
Lurks a cruel bee, that stings. 

And another man, the sculptor-poet, W. 
W. Story, rhymed these lines on 'Persica' : 

Oh, Persica, Persica, pale and fair, 
With a ripe blush on your cheek, 

How pretty — how very pretty you are, 
Until you begin to speak! 

120 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

As for a heart and soul, my dear, 
You have not enough to sin ; 

Outside so fair, like a peach you are, 
With a stone for a heart within. 

And it was a third man, Mr. George 
Birdseye, who ventured upon the attempt 
to elucidate the wiles of a 'Coquette': 

Her pleasure is in lovers coy ; 

When hers, she gives them not a thought; 
But, like the angler, takes more joy 

In fishing than in fishes caught. 

The same title served Mr. Thomas 
Bailey Aldrich for a most pungent and 
imaginative accusation against a type of 
woman not unfeminine: 

Or light or dark, or short or tail. 
She sets a spring to snare them all ; 
All's one to her; — above her fan 
She'd make sweet eyes at Caliban. 

And to Mr. Walter Learned we are 
indebted for one of the pleasantest of the 
many glancing shafts which have enlivened 
the merry war between the sexes. He has 
chosen to call it 'Humility' : 

121 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

You say, when I kissed you, you are sure I must quite 
Have forgotten myself. So I did ; you are right. 
No, I'm not such an egotist, dear, it is true, 
As to think of myself when I'm looking at you. 

The relation between literature and life 
is so close that there is no need to discuss 
which of these it was Mr. Aldrich had in 
mind when he penned his quatrain on 
'Masks' : 

Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise 

And shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; 

But when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, 

How wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears! 

But it is easy to guess that it was the 
rude but powerful poems of Walt Whit- 
man that Mr. Aldrich was criticizing when 
he wrote his lines, 'On Reading — ' 

Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth 
Lose half their preciousness and ever must. 
Unless the diamond with its own rich dust 

Be cut and polished, it seems little worth. 

Indeed, authors have taken each other 
for the targets of their satire quite as fre- 
quently as they have chosen to gird at the 

122 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

other sex. Mr. Richard Watson Gilder 
packed his scorn of an empty rhymester into 
a terse quatrain, which he entitled 'Wanted, 
A Theme': 

"Give me a theme," the little poet cried — 

"And I will do my part." 
" 'Tis not a theme you need," the world replied ; 

"You need a heart." 

And the same lyrist gave another turn 
to almost the same thought in the cutting 
lines of his 'Strephon and Sardon' : 

"Young Strephon wears his heart upon his sleeve," 

Thus Sardon spoke, with scoffing air ; 
Perhaps 'twas envy made the gray-beard grieve — 

For Sardon never had a heart to wear. 

Mr. J. T. Trovv'bridge in his autobiogra- 
phy preserves for us the six lines of rhyme 
evoked from him by the short-range con- 
templation of the curious characteristics of 
Bronson Alcott: 

Do you care to meet Alcott? His mind is a mirror. 
Reflecting the unspoken thought of his hearer: 
To the great he is great ; to the fool he's a fool : 
In the world's dreary desert a crystalline pool, 
Where a lion looks in and a lion appears; 
But an ass will see only his own ass's ears. 

X23 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

When water was first brought into Boston 
there was much discussion as to the health- 
fulness of the conduits through which it 
was conveyed ; and this evoked from Long- 
fellow these pungent rhymes: 

Cochituate water, it is said, 
Though introduced in pipes of lead, 

Will not prove deleterious; 
But if the stream of Helicon 
Through leaden pipes is made to run, 

The effect is very serious. 

An undergraduate rhymester of Colum- 
bia, Mr. Russell H. Loines, has voiced a 
feeling which many another reader of 
ephemeral verse will swiftly recognize. He 
was writing 'On a Magazine Sonnet': 

"Scorn not the sonnet," though its strength be sapped» 
Nor say malignant its inventor blundered ; 

The corpse that here in fourteen lines is wrapped 
Had otherwise been covered with a hundred. 

Mr. Stedman has told us that no other 
American poets have been so frequently 
discussed in print as Whitman and Poe. 
Mr. Aldrich's epigram, which we may 
assume to have Whitman for its theme, 
124 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

has already been quoted; and there are not 
a few epigrams on Poe, although no one 
of them rivals the polish and the point of 
Mr. Aldrich's. There is, however, one 
worthy of quotation, one launched by 
Father Tabb against 'Poe's Critics': 

A certain tyrant, to disgrace 
The more a rebel's resting place, 
Compelled the people every one 
To hurl, in passing there, a stone, 
Which done, behold, the pile became 
A monument to keep the name. 

And thus it is with Edgar Poe; 
Each passing critic has his throw, 
Nor sees, defeating his intent, 
How lofty grows the monument. 

Another there is, not against Poe or 
against his critics either, but having as its 
theme a pretentious biography of the Amer- 
ican poet by a British writer: 

An Englishman, Ingram, has written Poe's life; 

We recall, as we slowly toil through it. 
How keenly Poe wielded the critical knife. 

And we wish he were here to review it. 

Not quite so concise, and rather more 

125 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

vigorous In expression, are a dozen lines 
by the late Richard Henry Stoddard, in 
which he dwelt on the widespread success 
of the author of 'Proverbial Philosophy' : 

Hail to Martin Farquhar Tupper ! 
Who, when he bestrides the crupper 
Of Pegasus, gets the upper 
Hand of poets more renowned ; 
Everywhere his works are found, 
In poor men's huts, rich men's pavilions, 
Sold by thousands, sold by millions ; 
Suited to all times and latitudes, 
By the everlasting platitudes 
Spread for breakfast, dinner, supper, 
Hail to Martin Farquhar Tupper ! 

When a contributor to a long-forgotten 
literary weekly, the Round Table, chanced 
to refer disparagingly to a certain essay by 
Richard Grant White, that lively but sensi- 
tive essayist retorted at once with these 
brisk couplets: 

Some knight of King Arthur's, Sir Void or Sir Null, 
Swears a trifle I wrote is respectably dull. 
He is honest for once through his weakness of wit, 
And he censures a fault that he does not commit ; 
For he shows by example — proof quite unrejectable — 
That a man may be dull without being respectable. 
126 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

During one of the more heated periods 
of the absurd and unending discussion of 
the foolish suggestion that the plays of 
Shakspere were in reality written by Bacon, 
the late T. W. Parsons, best known as a 
devout student of Dante, ventured into the 
arena with these convincing lines : 

Shakspere ! whoever thou mayst prove to be, 

God save the Bacon that men find in thee ! 

If that philosopher, though bright and wise. 

Those lofty labors did in truth devise, 

Then it must follow, as the night the day, 

That 'Hamlet,' 'Lear,' 'Macbeth,' and each great play 

That certifies nobility of mind, 

Was written by the "meanest of mankind." 

And to this must be adjoined the sug- 
gestive quatrain of Mr. Aldrich, which he 
has wittily entitled 'Points of View': 

Bonnet in hand, obsequious and discreet. 

The butcher that served Shakspere with his meat 

Doubtless esteemed him little, as a man 

Who knew not how the market prices ran. 

Another admirable quatrain of Mr. 
Aldrich's expresses his wholesome dissatis- 
faction with the bards of despair; this is 
127 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

the epigram which he terms 'Pessimistic 
Poets' : 

I little read those poets who have made 
A noble art a pessimistic trade, 
And trained their Pegasus to draw a hearse 
Through endless avenues of drooping verse. 

Books as well as belles were sometimes 
the target for the arrows of Saxe's easy 
wit; and one of his prettily-phrased epi- 
grams is entitled 'Lucas a non' : 

You'll oft find in books, rather ancient than recent, 

A gap in the page marked "cetera desunt," 

By which you may commonly take it for granted 

The passage is wanting — without being wanted ; 

And may borrow, besides a significant hint 

That desunt means simply not decent to print. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes was ever a facile 
and felicitous writer of occasional verse; 
and he was a master of vers de societe with 
its subtly blended sentiment and humor; but 
he was rarely willing to limit himself within 
the narrow boundaries of the epigram. 
Indeed, there is apparently only one of his 
shorter poems which falls fairly within the 
128 



AMERICAN EPIGRAMS 

definition. This is the amusing example of 
fanciful imagination which he chose to call 
'Cacoethes Scribendi' : 

If all the trees in all the woods were men; 

And each and every blade of grass a pen ; 

If every leaf on every shrub and tree 

Turned to a sheet of foolscap ; every sea 

Were changed to ink, and all the earth's living tribes 

Had nothing else to do but act as scribes, 

And for ten thousand ages, day and night, 

The human race should write, and write and write, 

Till all the pens and paper were used up. 

And the huge inkstand was an empty cup, 

Still would the scribblers clustered round its brink 

Call for more pens, more paper, and more ink. 

There are many epigrammatic stanzas 
scattered through Holmes's occasional 
verses; but this is perhaps the only speci- 
men of his effort in the briefer form with 
the severe unity of theme which the true 
epigram insists upon. Of the American 
poets the two who are easily masters of 
this form are Lowell and Mr. Aldrich, 
the former having a bold vigor of his 
own and the latter preferring rather an 
ingenious delicacy. 

(1903). 129 



VII 
A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 

ONE of the most stimulating con- 
tributions which M. Brunetiere 
has made to criticism is his sug- 
gestion that each of the several 
kinds of poetry responds to a different de- 
mand of the human soul; and that therefore 
— since these demands are eternal — when- 
ever we find any special kind of poetry 
apparently absent from any particular 
period in any literature, we are likely then 
to find it in illegitimate combination with 
one of the other kinds. If, for example, the 
pure lyric is not visible in French literature 
at a given moment, we may discover that 
either the dramatic or the epic poetry of 
France just then happens to be unduly 
lyric. If, to take another example, we per- 
ceive that the drama is not flourishing in 
English literature during a certain epoch, 
130 



A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 

we are warranted in searching for an ex- 
pansion of the dramatic element in the 
epic of that epoch — the epic being held 
to include its prose brother, the novel. 

There were nine Muses in Greece of old, 
and to every one is committed the guardian- 
ship of a single art; and if any of them 
may chance to be faint and weary, one of 
her sisters is ever ready to take up her 
burden and to bear it for her until her 
strength returns. The arts came into being 
to satisfy the needs of man; and the needs 
of man vary only a little with the lapse of 
the years. Every one who has ever had 
occasion to compare the literatures of the 
ancients with the literatures of the moderns, 
must gladly have noted now and again the 
serene and Attic simplicity of some latter- 
day achievements and must have remarked 
once more the eternal and surprising fresh- 
ness of some masterpiece of antiquity. 

One of the precious treasures which we 
have happily inherited from the past is the 
collection which is known as the 'Greek 
131 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Anthology,' and which contained the lesser, 
rather than the larger, of the lyrical effu- 
sions of that race of poets who were ever 
seeking the utmost perfection of phrase 
and the utmost purity of emotion. They 
recall to us not the mighty art of the Parthe- 
non frieze, but rather the graceful and 
delicate workmanship of the Tanagra fig- 
urines. They may sometimes stretch them- 
selves to the length of the idyl, but more 
often they are content to shrink to the mod- 
est dimensions of the epigram. And the 
epigram of the Greeks was not like ours; 
It was not a neatly turned witticism with a 
snap of the whip at the end of it; it was 
rather a single, simple thought, compressed 
into a few lines, ingenious in expression, 
and exquisite In sentiment. As Lord Neaves 
says, the "true or the best form of the 
early Greek epigram does not aim at wit 
or seek to produce surprise; Its purpose 
Is to set forth in the shortest, simplest, plain- 
est language, but yet with perfect purity 
and even elegance of diction, some fact or 
132 



A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 

feeling of such interest as would prompt 
the real or supposed speaker to record it." 
More than one eulogist of the 'Greek 
Anthology' has bepraised it as a manifes- 
tation of the Greek genius without any 
equivalent in modern literature. In its 
own special field it may be without any 
equal in our latter-day poetry; but in so 
far as we are men like the Greeks with 
emotions akin to theirs, it is not likely to 
be wholly without any equivalent. Even 
though no modern collection exists prop- 
erly to be compared with the 'Greek An- 
thology,' the elements of such a collection 
must be scattered here and there awaiting 
the pious offices of a devoted collector. 
In no modern literature is there a lack of 
brief lyrics, wherein the singers of our own 
time have voiced their sentiments, simply 
and effectively. Although our modern epi- 
gram is not the epigram of the Greeks, none 
the less has the Greek epigram its analogues 
in our literature, even if we do not know 
them by the Greek name. The 'Days' of 
133 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Emerson, for example, and his 'Letters,' 
and his 'Forbearance' are worthy of the 
'Greek. Anthology' so far as their simple 
elevation is concerned and the felicity of 
their phrasing. 

It is true that the Athenian specimens 
of star-dust are unrhymed; and that ever 
since the Middle Ages we have more often 
than not preferred to rhyme our lyrics. 
Ever since the Renascence, indeed, we have 
revealed a tendency not only to rhyme, but 
to arrange our rhymes according to a pat- 
tern. It is in the sonnet that the poets of 
the past four centuries have been wont to 
express those uncomplicated feelings for 
which the Greeks held their own epigram 
to be sufficient. The Greek had found his 
advantage in adopting a rather rigid metri- 
cal scheme for his lesser lyric; and we mod- 
erns have felt a like aid in the strict struc- 
ture of the sonnet. A lyrist is at once re- 
strained and sustained by a fixed form, the 
framework of rhyme making the task easier 
than it seemed, since the necessary words 
134 



A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 

may often spur the lagging fancy. On the 
other hand, the limitations of the rhyming 
scheme, though they may help the weak- 
ling, make even more difficult the achieve- 
ment of the highest perfection. 

The modern sonnet has thus an obvious 
analogy to the brief lyric of the 'Greek 
Anthology;' and it seems as though it might 
have also occasionally a certain relation to 
the Greek ode — or at least to some single 
member of that ode. Perhaps it may be 
a little fanciful to suggest that if Milton 
had been a Greek, born before the sonnet 
had been devised and before rhyme had 
been elaborated, he might have utilized in 
an ode the righteous wrath which inspired 
the noble and sonorous sonnet on the 'Late 
Massacre in Piedmont' — "Avenge, O Lord, 
Thy slaughtered saints." And of a cer- 
tainty it would have been possible for Low- 
ell to use the sonnet-form for his imagina- 
tive interpretations of Washington and 
of Lincoln. 

There is, however, another modern form 
135 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

which would demand abundant representa- 
tion in any attempt to prepare a latter-day 
equivalent to the 'Greek Anthology.' This 
is the quatrain, which many a modern 
lyrist, more especially in English, has 
chosen as the form in which to express a 
thought or a sentiment not rich enough for 
the comparativ^e amplitude of the sonnet. 
Just as the sonnet has established itself 
solidly in English poetry, while the other 
fixed forms, the ballade and the rondeau 
and their lesser brethren, are scarcely yet 
acclimated amongst us, so the quatrain has 
been accepted, while the sixain, the huitain 
and the dixain — to give the French titles 
to these poems of a single stanza of six, 
and eight, and ten lines — have tempted 
only a very few of those who write English. 
If one of our poets cannot say what he 
wants to say in four lines, he is likely to 
say it in fourteen. If what he has to say 
is not important enough for the ambitious 
fourteener, he is likely to strive to condense 
it into the single stanza of four lines. 
136 



A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 

The sonnet has been discussed and ana- 
lyzed and belauded; but the quatrain has 
never received its due recognition. It has 
made its way without loud heralding — such 
as accompanied the revival of the ballade, 
for instance. It has won its wide popularity 
modestly and by dint of merit alone. Poets 
have made use of it apparently without 
thinking of it as a fixed form — if, indeed, 
it can fairly be so entitled. In fact, the 
sole poet who seems to have proclaimed 
its worth is Mr. Frank Dempster Sherman, 
who used the form itself to sing its own 
praise: 

Hark at the lips of this pink whorl of shell 

And you shall hear the ocean's surge and roar; 

So in the quatrain's measure, written well, 
A thousand lines shall all be sung in four! 

As the Greek epigram served for votive 
tables so the quatrain has been chosen by 
several American poets for memoVial in- 
scriptions wherein a lapidary concision was 
needful. For the beautiful windows put 
up in St. Margaret's, Westminster, in mem- 
137 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

ory of Raleigh and of Milton, the inscrip- 
tions were written by Lowell and Whittier. 
Here is Lowell's quatrain on Raleigh : 

The New World's Sons, from England's breast we 
drew 

Such milk as bids remember whence we came; 
Proud of her Past from which our Present grew, 

This window we erect to Raleigh's name. 

And here is Whittier's on Milton : 

The New World honors him whose lofty plea 

For England's freedom made her own more sure, 

Whose song, immortal as its theme, shall be 
Their common freehold while both worlds endure. 

Whittier wrote another quatrain for the 
memorial tablet to Mrs. Sigourney, in 
Christ Church, Hartford: 

She sang alone, ere womanhood had known 
The gift of song which fills the air today : 

Tender and sweet, a music all her own 
May fitly linger where she knelt to pray. 

And Lowell has preserved in the latest 
volume of his poems the inscription he had 
prepared for a soldiers' and sailors' monu- 
ment in Boston : 

138 



A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 

To those who died for her on land and sea, 
That she might have a country great and free, 
Boston builds this: build ye her monument 
In lives like theirs, at duty's summons spent. 

This has not a little of the stately eleva- 
tion we admire in the best inscriptions of 
the 'Greek Anthology.' But Lowell used 
the quatrain not only to honor the dead 
but also to carry a greeting of affection to 
the living. On the seventy-fifth birthday 
of Asa Gray, the foremost of American 
botanists received congratulations from all 
parts of the country ; and among them were 
these four lines from Lowell : 

Just fate, prolong his file, well spent. 

Whose indefatigable hours 
Have been as gayly innocent 

And fragrant as his flowers. 

Lowell, indeed, not only sent a quatrain 
as an appropriate salutation, but he also 
received one on his own birthday from a 
younger poet, Mr. Richard Watson Gilder: 

Navies nor armies can exalt the state, — 
Millions of men, nor coined wealth untold: 
Down to the pit may sink a land of gold ; 

But one great name can make a country great. 
139 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

The same lyrist has chosen the quatrain 
also to contain his praise of the 'Washing- 
ton Monument, at Washington, D. C : 

Straight soars to heaven the white magnificence, — 
Free as man's thought, high as one lonely name. 

True image of his soul, — serene, immense, — 
Mightiest of monuments and mightiest fame. 

It was to a still younger American poet, 
H. C. Bunner — whose life was cut short 
almost in his youth — that we owe another 
'To a Hyacinth Plucked for Decoration 
Day,' which has not a little of the Attic 
fragrance and felicity : 

O Flower, plucked before the dew 
Could wet th}' thirsty petals blue — 
Grieve not ! a dearer dew for thee 
Shall be the tears of memory. 

Another of Bunner's quatrains deals also 
with death; this is the vigorous address 
'To a Dead Woman' : 

Not a kiss in life; but one kiss, at life's end, 

I have set on the face of Death in trust for thee. 
Through long years keep it fresh on thy lips, O 
friend ! 
At the gate of Silence give it back to me. 
140 



A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 

To many careless readers Bunner's name 
is known only as that of a humorist; but 
he had also the sentiment and the pathos 
which are ever characteristics of the true 
humorist, who is more than a manufacturer 
of inexpensive jests. An earlier writer of 
light verse, George Arnold, had also his 
more serious side, which never found 
deeper expression than in his quatrain called 
'An Autobiography' : 

I was born some time ago, but I know not why: 
I have lived, — I hardly know either how or where : 

Some time or another, I suppose, I shall die ; 

But where, how or when, I neither know nor care ! 

Here, after this vain vaunting, it may 
be well to place another of Lowell's qua- 
trains, one of the little group which he 
entitled 'Sayings' : 

In life's small things be resolute and great 

To keep thy muscles trained; know'st thou when 

Fate 
Thy measure takes, or when she'll say to thee, 
"I find thee worthy; do this deed for me?" 

To places opportunity may come, as well 

141 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

as to persons, as Mr. M, A. De Wolfe 
Howe has suggested In his 'Distinction': 

The village sleeps, a name unknown, till men 

With life-blood stain its soil, and pay the due 

That lifts it to eternal fame, — for then 
'Tis grown a Gettysburg or Waterloo. 

With this may be linked another sug- 
gestive quatrain, by Mr. Selden L. Whit- 
comb, on 'Pain' : 

It changed the soul of one to sour 

And passionate regret; 
To one it gave unselfish power 

To love and to forget. 

It was to one of the undergraduate pub- 
lications of Columbia University that this 
was contributed; and from the same 
monthly may be taken two other qua- 
trains, dealing each of them with one of 
these names which it is well for the young 
to learn to love. The first is by Mr. Walter 
G. Kellogg: 

If the gods would grant some favor to my Muse, 
And let me sound a sweet yet potent note, 

This boon above all others would I choose, 
That I might write as dear old Herrick wrote. 

142 



A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 

And the second is from the pen of a 
scholar-poet, still connected with Columbia, 
Mr. Joel E. Spingarn. It has for its theme 
the English lyrist, who perhaps appeals 
most ardently to all youthful lovers of 
poetry — Keats : 

The Star of Fame shines down upon the river, 

And answering the Stream of Life repeats : 
"Upon our waters shall be writ forever 
The name of Keats." 

In a collection of 'Yale Verse' may be 
found a suggestive quatrain by Mr. Walter 
D. Makepeace, on a subject that has 
tempted not a few poets, 'Sleep' : 

Down through the mist of half-forgotten things 
Tired spirits sink beneath night's slumberous sea, 

And, lapped in dream-waves, hear soft murmurings 
Of Life's blest prelude to Eternity. 

No American poet has shown a more 
frequent preference for the quatrain than 
Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and no one 
has better understood at once its possibili- 
ties and its limitations. He has unerring 
certainty of touch; and he never makes 
the mistake of distending into a sonnet a 
143 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

thought that would be better compacted 
into a quatrain. Consider, for example, 
how graceful and how charming are the 
four lines which he has called 'Memories' : 

Two things there are with Memory will abide, 
Whatever else befall, while life flows by: 

That soft cold hand-touch at the altar side; 
The thrill that shook you at your child's first cry. 

And contrast that quatrain with this, 
which he has aptly entitled 'Pessimist and 
Optimist' : 

This one sits shivering in Fortune's smile, 
Taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath: 

This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while 
Laughs in the teeth of Death. 

Other American poets there are who 
have delighted in the quatrain; and three 
further quotations may be adduced to bring 
out even more clearly the advantage of 
the condensed form. One Is by Mr. Walter 
Learned, and he calls it 'Burning the Love- 
Letters' : 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, 
When life has quit the mortal frame. 

When Love is at his last, we must 
Bury him thus, with flame to flame. 
144 



A NOTE ON THE QUATRAIN 

The second is by Mr. Edwin Markham, 
who has taken for his theme, 'Poetry' : 

She comes like the hush and beauty of the night, 

And sees too deep for laughter ; 
Her touch is a vibration and a light 

From worlds before and after. 

And the third is due to Mr. William 
H. Hayne, who was moved to melody by 
musing 'On a Bust of Mendelssohn' : 

His high-arched brow and quiet eyelids seem 
Brushed by the wings of some celestial dream — 
A bird of passage whose melodious breath 
Dispersed in music the wan mist of Death. 

In this attempt to draw attention to 
the quatrain as a definite form, excel- 
lently devised for the expression of a 
lyric emotion not ample enough for the 
more spacious sonnet, the illustrations 
here selected have all been taken from 
our own American poets, partly because 
the quatrain has been cherished rather 
more by our native lyrists than by their 
British contemporaries, and also partly be- 
cause the thoughts they have to express 
145 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

are a little more likely to appeal to us than 
are the sentiments voiced by our kin across 
the sea, who are at once so like us and 
so unlike us. Certain of the Victorian 
poets have abundantly employed the stern 
simplicity of the quatrain — Mr. William 
Watson, for one; and omission must not 
be made of the fact that in St. Margaret's, 
Westminster, besides the two windows 
adorned with the commemorative quatrains 
of Lowell and of Whittier, are two others 
bearing inscriptions also in four lines each 
by Tennyson and Browning. 
(1903). 



146 



VIII 
CAROLS OF COOKERY 

IN one of the preliminary epistles con- 
tained in the opening pages of a 
poem on the 'Art of Cookery,' pub- 
lished in London in 1709, the au- 
thor presents historic instances to support 
the lofty eminence upon which he estab- 
lishes the art he is going immediately to 
eulogize in several hundred heroic couplets. 
"Indeed, Cookery," so he declares solemnly, 
"has an Influence upon Men's Actions even 
in the highest Stations of human Life. 
The great Philosopher Pythagoras, in his 
'Golden Verses,' shews himself to be ex- 
tremely nice in Eating, when he makes it 
one of his chief Principles of Morality to 
abstain from Beans. The noblest Foun- 
dations of Honour, Justice and Integrity 
were found to lye hid in Turnips, as ap- 
pears in that great Dictator, Cincinnatus, 
147 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

who went from the Plough to the Com- 
mand of the Roman Army; and having 
brought home Victory, retir'd to his Cot- 
tage : For when the Samnite Ambassadors 
came thither to him, with a large Bribe, 
and found him dressing Turnips for his 
Repast, they immediately return'd with 
this Sentence, 'That it was impossible to 
prevail upon him that could be contented 
with such a Supper.' In short, there are 
no honorary Appellations but what may 
be made use of to Cooks; for I find through- 
out the whole Reign of Charlemain, that 
the Great Cook of the Palace was one of 
the prime Ministers of State, and Con- 
ductor of Armies." 

This metrical 'Art of Cookery' is 
avowedly modelled upon the 'Art of 
Poetry' of Horace. This bard of the 
buttery, this lyrist of the larder, this song- 
ster of the serving-room, tells us that 

A Prince who in a Forest rides astray, 
And weary to some Cottage finds the way, 
Talks of no Pyramids of Fowl or Bisks of Fish, 
148 



CAROLS OF COOKERY 

But hungry sups his Cream serv'd up in Earthen 

Dish : 
Quenches his Thirst with Ale in nut-brown Bowls, 
And takes the hasty Rasher from the Coals : 
Pleas'd as King Henry with the Miller free, 
Who thought himself as good a Man as He. 

The poet is abundant In advice, and he 
bids 

You that from pliant Paste wou'd Fabricks raise, 
Expecting thence to gain immortal Praise, 
Your Knuckles try, and let your Sinews know 
Their Power to knead, and give the Form to Dough, 
Chuse your Materials right, your seas'ning fix. 
And with your Fruit resplendent Sugar mix ; 
From thence of course the Figure will arise. 
And Elegance adorn the Surface of your Pies. 

He is apt in axiom, and he declares that 

If you wou'd have me merry with your Cheer 
Be so yourself, or so at least appear. 

And he asks pertinently : 

Unless some Sweetness at the Bottom lye. 
Who cares for all the crinkling of the Pye? 

But even in pastry he is against undue 
extravagance : 

Next let Discretion moderate your Cost, 
And when you treat, three Courses be the most. 
149 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Let never fresh Machines your Pastry try, 

Unless Grandees or Magistrates are by, 

Then you may put a Dwarf into a Pye. 

Or if you'd fright an Alderman and Mayor, 

Within a Pasty lodge a living Hare ; 

Then midst their gravest Furs shall Mirth arise, 

And all the Guild pursue with joyful Cries. 

Perhaps the most characteristic passage 
In the whole poem Is that wherein Horace 
himself Is Invoked, and wherein the like- 
ness of the poet to the pastry-cook Is for- 
mally established : 

Were Horace, that great Master, now alive, 

A Feast with Wit and Judgment he'd contrive. 

As thus — supposing that you wou'd rehearse 

A labour'd Work, and every Dish a Verse. 

He'd say, mend this, and t'other Line, and this; 

If after Tryal it were still amiss. 

He'd bid you give it a new Turn of Face> 

Or set some Dish more curious in its Place, 

If you persist he wou'd not strive to move 

A Passion so delightful as Self-love. 

We shou'd submit our Treats to Criticks View, 
And ev'ry prudent Cook shou'd read Bossu. 
Judgment provides the Meat in Season fit. 
Which by the Genius drest, its Sauce is wit. 
Good Beef for Men, Pudding for Youth and Age, 
Come up to the Decorum of the Stage. 
150 



CAROLS OF COOKERY 

The Critick strikes out all that is not just, 
And 'tis ev'n so the Butler chips his Crust. 
Poets and Pastry-Cooks will be the same, 
Since both of them their Images must frame. 
Chimera's form the Poet's Fancy show, 
The Cook contrives his Shapes in real Dough. 

Thus wrote a British imitator of the 
Roman songster of society in the early 
part of the eighteenth century; and in the 
later part of the nineteenth century an 
American imitator of Horace, the late 
Eugene Field, seems to have been moved 
by a like impulse. Without going so far 
as to identify poet and pastry-cook, he 
felt called upon to hymn the praise of 
'Rare Roast Beef,' and of 'Gosling Stew' 
and of 'Apple Pie and Cheese.' Of these 
three lilting lyrics, each with a culinary 
ecstasy of its own, the third is by far the 
best worth quoting here. It has the flavor 
of New England, beyond all question; it 
is not without a gusto of its own; and the 
writer evidently revelled in his adroit alter- 
nation of double and single rhymes; — 
'Apple Pie and Cheese' : 
151 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Full many a sinful notion 

Conceived of foreign powers 
Has come across the ocean 

To harm this land of ours; 
And heresies called fashions 

Have modesty effaced, 
And baleful, morbid passions 

Corrupt our native taste. 

tempora ! O mores ! 
What profanations these 

That seek to dim the glories 
Of apple pie and cheese ! 
****** 

De gustibus, 'tis stated, 

Non disputandum est. 
Which meaneth, when translated, 

That all is for the best. 
So let the foolish choose 'em 

The vapid sweets of sin, 

1 will not disabuse 'em 

Of the heresy they're in; 
But I, when I undress me 

Each night, upon my knees 
Will ask the Lord to bless me 

With apple pie and cheese ! 

It must be admitted, however, that the 
British imitator of Horace and the Ameri- 
can are not the only poets who have spoken 
highly of the doubtful dish which the one 

152 



CAROLS OF COOKERY 

spells Pye and the other pie. Emerson, 
a loftier man than either of the others, 
beyond all question, penned no ode to 
pastry, it is true; what he had to say in 
its praise was said in prose, no doubt, and 
yet what more magnificent eulogy could 
he have bestowed than his simple query, 
addressed to those who sat at table with 
him and who had rejected his proffer of a 
wedge of pie, "But what is pie for?" 

And Dr. Holmes, quoting this anec- 
dote, asks permission to declare "that pie, 
often foolishly abused, is a good creature, 
at the right time and in angles of thirty 
or forty degrees," although "in semicir- 
cles and quadrants it may sometimes prove 
too much for delicate stomachs." 

One of the writers who contributed to 
the 'Liber Scriptorum,' the Book of the 
Authors Club of New York, has therein 
ventured an explanation of the strange 
anomaly to which Dr. Holmes draws at- 
tention, that Emerson, an abandoned pie- 
eater as he was, never complained of dys- 
153 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

pepsia, whereas Carlyle, although he was 
fed on the wholesome oatmeal of his na- 
tive land, was forever at war with his 
stomach and "lived with half his self-con- 
sciousness habitually centred beneath his 
diaphragm." The explanation proffered 
by the member of the Authors Club Is as 
simple as it is alluring; there was so total 
and complete a sympathy between the 
American sage and the Scotch humorist 
that for the first time in recorded history 
we can behold the phenomenon of the 
Transfusion of Indigestion. In other 
words, Emerson ate the pie and Carlyle 
had the dyspepsia ! 

Of all the pies that are prevalent 
throughout the great American Pie-Belt, 
it may be admitted at once that the mince 
is, perhaps, the most deadly, but it cannot 
be denied that the pumpkin is the most 
characteristically American, If not also 
the most popular. Twice have simple 
lyrists lifted up their voices to carol forth 
the proper praise of this delightful dish. 
The first of these Is anonymous; and It 
154 



CAROLS OF COOKERY 

was in 1818 that he contributed to the 
Boston Sentinel these stanzas inspired by 
sincere enthusiasm, the 'Pumpkin Pye.' 

The bards of the Hudson may sing of the melon, 

Its smooth, jetty seeds and its ripe, ruddy core. 
And the feast of the reaper with ecstasy dwell on. 

Reclining at noon on the cool, breezy shore ; 
For me, the rich soil of New England produces 

An offering more dear to the taste and the eye, 
The bright yellow pumpkin — how mellow its juices. 

When temper'd with ginger, and bak'd into pye. 
******* 
Then hail to the Muse of the pumpkin and onion ! 

The Frenchman may laugh and the Englishman 
sneer 
At the land of the Bible, and psalm book, and 
Bunyan, 

Still, still to my bosom her green hills are dear ; 
Her daughters are pure as her bright crystal 
fountains. 

And Hymen, if ever thy blessings I try, 
O ! give me the girl of my own native mountains. 

Who knows how to temper the sweet pumpkin pye. 

The second was no less a poet than 

John Greenleaf Whittier, the laureate of 

New England, the singer who has given 

voice to the homely sentiments of his sec- 

155 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

tion more satisfactorily than any other. 
Perhaps it may be objected that he deals 
with the fruit wherefrom the pie is com- 
pounded than with the pie itself; but this 
objection is too trivial for discussion. 
Here is a stanza of Whittier's autumnal 
dithyramb on the pumpkin : 

Ah ! on Thanksgiving Day, when from East and from 

West, 
From North and from South come the pilgrim and 

guest ; 
When the grey-haired New Englander sees round 

his board 
The old broken links of affection restored ; 
When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once 

more, 
And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled 

before ; 
What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye, 
What calls back the past like the rich pumpkin pie? 

An earlier American poet than either of 
these has sung of an American dish more 
primitive than apple pie or pumpkin. When 
Joel Barlow — the maker of that great gun 
of poesy, the 'Columblad,' now spiked In 
silence and rusting in oblivion — was at 
156 



CAROLS OF COOKERY 

Chambery in Savoy in January, 1793, his 
thoughts turned homeward to his native 
land and to the toothsome simphcity of 
homely hasty-pudding. He was moved to 
prepare three cantos in commendation of 

The sweets of Hasty-Pudding. Come, dear bowl, 
Glide o'er my palate, and inspire my soul. 
The milk beside thee, smoking from the kine, 
Its substance mingle, married in with thine, 
Shall cool and temper thy superior heat, 
And save the pains of blowing while I eat. 

A httle later the poet's strain rises with 
the occasion, and he seeks to ascertain the 
lofty origin of the grateful dish he was 
decking with chaplets of couplets gathered 
in his distant exile: 

Assist me first with pious toil to trace 
Through wrecks of time, thy lineage and thy race ; 
Declare what lovely squaw, in days of yore, 
(Ere great Columbus sought thy native shore) 
First gave thee to the world ; her works of fame 
Have lived indeed, but lived without a name. 
Some tawny Ceres, goddess of her days, 
First learned with stones to crack the well-dried 

maize, 
Through the rough sieve to shake the golden shower, 
In boiling water stir the yellow flour; 

157 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

The yellow flour, bestrewed and stirred with haste, 

Swells in the flood and thickens to a paste, 

Then puffs and wallops, rises to the brim, 

Drinks the dry knobs that on the surface swim, 

The knobs at last the busy ladle breaks, 

And the whole mass her true consistence takes. 

Even over in Europe, on the confines 
of France and Italy, he found the Indian 
corn transplanted and doing its duty nobly 
though in a foreign clime: 

But man, more fickle, the bold license claims, 
In different realms to give thee different names. 
Thee the soft nations round the warm Levant 
Polenta call, the French, of course, Polente. 
E'en in thy native regions, now I blush 
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee Mush! 
On Hudson's banks, while men of Belgic spawn 
Insult and eat thee by the name Suppawn. 
All spurious appellations, void of truth ; 
I've better known thee from my earliest youth — 
Thy name is Hasty-Pudding! thus my sire 
Was wont to greet thee fuming from his fire. 

A curious comparison next Invites us to 
set beside this epic praise of one of the 
ways of serving the products of our national 
plant, the maize, with a lighter lyric, 
wherein a negro balladlst has sung the joys 
158 



CAROLS OF COOKERY 

that accompany another form, in which 
Indian-meal may be prepared for the tempt- 
ing of our palates. Here are two stanzas 
of Mr. Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem, 
•When the Co'n-Pone's Hot' : 

Dey is times in life when Nature 

Seems to slip a cog an' go, 
Jes' a-rattlin' down creation, 

Lak an ocean's overflow ; 
When the worl' jes' stahts a-spinnin' 

Lak a pickaninny's top, 
An' yo' cup o' joy is brimmin' 

Twell it seems about to slop. 
An' you feel jes' lak a racah 

Dat is trainin' fu' to trot — 

When yo' mammy ses de blessin' 

An' de co'n-pone's hot. 
****** 

I have heerd o' lots o' sermons. 

An' I've heerd o' lots o' prayers, 
An' I've listened to some singin' 

Dat has tuk me up de stairs 
Of de Glory-Lan' an' set me 

Jes' below de Mahster's th'one, 
An' have lef my hawt singin' 

In a happy aftahtone, 
But dem wu'ds so sweetly murmured 

Seems to tech de softes' spot, 
When my mammy ses de blessin' 

An' de co'n-pone's hot. 
159 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Hasty-pudding and corn-pone, nourish- 
ing as they are and estimable in every way, 
lack distinction a little; they smack of the 
log cabin and of the negro quarters; they 
would not appeal to the Little Brothers 
of the Rich. For them rather does the 
miserable goose fatten his unhealthy liver; 
for them the canvasback seeks out the wild 
celery; for them the terrapin fulfils the 
end of his existence. Mr. Herman Oelrichs 
has rhymed for us his regret that the 
Roman epicures had to depart this life 
without having tasted the terrapin; and it 
is evident that the sympathetic poet believes 
their lives to have been wasted, and worse 
than wasted, since they failed of the bliss 
they were most capable of appreciating. 

And if terrapin would be a dish worthy 
of Horace, what would Thackeray have 
thought of it? Thackeray penned the 
'Ballad of Bouillabaisse,' and lent to that 
unsavoury and unsatisfactory mess — there 
is no other word for it than that ! — the 
incomparable aroma of his playful pathos : 
i6o 



CAROLS OF COOKERY 

This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is — 

A sort of soup or broth, or brew, 
Or hotpotch of all sorts of fishes, 

That Greenwich never could outdo; 
Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, 

Soles, onions, garlic, roach and dace; 
All these you eat at Terre's tavern, 

In that one dish of Bouillabaisse. 

Indeed, a rich and savory stew 'tis ; 

And true philosophers, methinks, 
Who love all sorts of natural beauties. 

Should love good victuals aad good drinks. 
And Cordelier or Benedictine 

Might gladly, sure, his lot embrace. 
Nor find a fast-day too afflicting. 

Which served him up a Bouillabaisse. 

The sentimental visitors to Marseilles 
who seek out a proper place to try to like 
that untempting dish, are rarely honest 
enough with themselves to admit that it 
is not the dish itself they have enjoyed, 
but the tenderness of Thackeray's touch- 
ing verses: 

Where are you, old companions trusty 
Of early days here met to dine? 

Come, waiter ! quick, a flagon crusty — 
I'll pledge them in the good old wine. 
i6i 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

The kind old voices and old faces 

My memory can quick retrace ; 
Around the board they take their places, 

And share the wine and Bouillabaisse. 

The learned Dr. Gross is a professor 
in the University of Freiburg, and he is 
the author of a most interesting and most 
instructive treatise on the 'Beginnings of 
Art,' in the pages of which he discusses 
not only sculpture and architecture and 
painting, but also music and the dance, 
the drama and poetry. And some of the 
readers of this paper who may have sup- 
posed that it was only in a sophisticated 
period of high development and of abun- 
dant leisure that man could spare time to 
rhyme recipes and to chant the charm of 
cookery, will be surprised to learn that this 
was a habit also of primitive man. "The 
lyric poetry of hunting tribes," so Dr. 
Gross assures us, "very rarely soars to a 
higher flight; it rather abides with unmis- 
takable preference in the lower regions of 
sensuality. The coarsest material pleas- 
162 



CAROLS OF COOKERY 

ures occupy a very large space In primitive 
verse; and Ave do these poets no wrong 
when we say that their lyric Inspiration Is 
quite as often of the stomach as of the 
heart. It must indeed appear a real sacri- 
lege to an Ideal aesthete that we presume to 
pass off the eating and drinking songs of 
the Australians and Botocudos, especially 
as poetical productions. They are, never- 
theless, such, as they are truly expressions 
of feeling In verbal rhythmic form. No 
feeling Is in and of Itself poetic; and there 
is no feeling which cannot be made poetical 
If it Is expressed in an sesthetlc form for 
an esthetic purpose. It may, moreover, 
soften the indignation that arises against 
the use that is made here of the name 
of poetry. If we recollect that even the 
tenderest lyric poets of civilization occa- 
sionally do not consider It unworthy of 
them to extol the pleasures of the table." 
(1900). 



163 



B 



IX 

RECIPES IN RHYME 

4 4 Hi ^ OOKS," said that acute critic, 
Walter Bagehot, "are for 
various purposes : tracts, to 
teach; almanacs, to sell; 
poetry, to make pastry." The British scof- 
fer did not foresee that a Gallic dramatist, 
the author of 'Cyrano de Bergerac,' would 
one day set upon the stage a pastry cook 
who should be also a poet and who would 
be therefore able to declare the eternal 
principles of the culinary art in imperish- 
able rhyme. It is this Ragueneau of M. 
de Rostand who thus sets forth the proper 
manner of preparing that delectable dish 
fcnowc as 'Les Tartelettes Amandines' : 

Battez, pour qu'ils soient mousseux 

Quelques oeuf s ; 
Incorporez a leur mousse 
Un jus de cedrat choisi; 

Versez-y 
Un bon lait d'amande douce; 
164 



RECIPES IN RHYME 

Mettez de la pate a flan 

Dans le flanc 
De moules a tartclette ; 
D'un doigt presle, abricotez 

Les cotes ; 
Versez goutte a gouttelette 

Votre mousse en ces puits, puis 

Que ces puits 
Passant au four, et, blondines, 
Sortant en gais troupelets, 

Ce sont les 
Tartelettes amandines ! 

And this has been rendered readily into 
Enghsh rhymes by Gertrude Hall, thus: 
'Almond Cheese Cakes': 

Briskly beat to lightness due, 

Eggs a few ; 
With the eggs so beaten, beat — 
Nicely strained for this same use — 

Lemon juice, 
Adding milk of almonds, sweet. 

With fine pastry dough, rolled flat, 

After that, 
Line each little scalloped mould ; 
Round the sides, light-fingered, spread 

Marmalade ; 
Pour the liquid eggy gold, 

165 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Into each delicious pit ; 

Prison it 
In the oven, — and, by and by, 
Almond cheese cakes will in gay 

Blonde array 
Bless your nostril and your eye ! 

Another French dramatist, the younger 
Alexander Dumas, has caused a charming 
young lady in his comedy of 'Francillon' 
to declare the true formula of a Japanese 
salad — avowedly of her own invention. 
But this formula is In bald prose — nay, 
more, it Is In the broken dialogue of the 
stage ; and therefore it is inadmissible amid 
these recipes, more metrical, If not more 
musical. The so-called Japanese salad of 
the Frenchman Is just a little too compli- 
cated to win favor In the eyes of American 
epicures, whose taste Is simpler, less sophis- 
ticated — in a word, purer. In a salad the 
full flavor of the chief ingredient should be 
evoked directly by the dressing, the sharp- 
ness of the vinegar and the blandness of 
the oil uniting for the purpose. And this 
Is why the British salads often lack a wel- 
i66 



RECIPES IN RHYME 

come from Americans; they are too fussy; 
they are not content to let well enough 
alone. It is this which vitiates the best 
known of all rhyming recipes — that of 
Sydney Smith, for a winter salad : 

Two large potatoes passed through the kitchen sieve 

Unwonted softness to the salad give. 

Of mordant mustard add a single spoon — 

Distrust the condiment which bites too soon. 

But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault 

To add a double quantity of salt. 

Three times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown, 

And once with vinegar procured from town. 

True flavor needs it, and your poet begs 

The pounded yellow of the two well-boiled eggs. 

Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl. 

And unsuspected animate the whole. 

And, lastly, on the flavored compound toss 

A magic teaspoon of anchovy sauce. 

Then though green turtle fail, though venison's 

tough, 
And ham and turkey are not boiled enough, 
Serenely full the epicure may say, 
"Fate cannot harm me — I have dined to-day !" 

The verse is brisk enough, whatever may 

be thought of the moral; and the reverend 

rhymester has set a model for a host of later 

poetasters (perhaps even one might here 

167 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

venture on an orthography more appropri- 
ate, however inaccurate, and style these 
imitators of the good dean — poet-tasters). 
The most of these followers of Sydney 
Smith are nameless; they have failed to 
tag themselves to their formulas, from 
modesty, perhaps, and perhaps from care- 
lessness. Here, for example, are two sets 
of versified directions for compounding the 
delectable plum pudding. The first of 
them is of British authorship, apparently, 
and also of a stricter orthodoxy; a 'Poetical 
Recipe for English Plum Pudding' : 

To make a plum pudding to Englishmen's taste, 

So all may be eaten and nothing be waste, 

Take of raisins, and currants, and bread crumbs all 

round ; 
Also suet from oxen, and of flour a pound. 
Of citron well candied, or lemon as good, 
With molasses and sugar, eight ounces, I would. 
Into this first compound next must be hasted 
A nutmeg well grated, ground ginger well tasted, 
Then of milk half a pint, and of fresh eggs take six; 
Be sure after this that you properly mix. 
Next tie up in a bag, just as round as you can, 
Put it into a capacious and suitable pan. 
Then boil for eight hours just as hard as you can. 
i68 



RECIPES IN RHYME 

The second seems rather to be of Amer- 
ican origin, although in such matters exact 
accuracy is difficult of attainment and the 
poet without a name is likely to prove a 
man without a country unless his speech 
betrayeth him; — 'Plum Pudding': 

Aunt Betsy makes good pudding, 

And you can likewise do it 
If you follow her directions : 

"Take half a pound of suet, 
Three quarter pounds of bread crumbs fine, 
Two tablespoons of brandy wine. 
One and a quarter pounds of fruit, 
A pinch of grated ginger root, 
Quarter-pound moist sugar — brown — 
A single nutmeg grated down, 
Two tablespoons of milk or cream 
(The latter is best, I deem) 
Four eggs — and just enough molasses 
To fill one of your small wine-glasses — 
Then steam five hours." I'm sure you'll say 
"No better cook than Betsy Leigh." 

The model set by Sydney Smith has been 

followed also by Mr. Adolph Meyer in a 

string of couplets wherein he praises one of 

the foremost of American contributions to 

169 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

the resources of the gastronomic art. In 
spite of his Teutonic name, the poet is prob- 
ably an American — although it is to be re- 
called always that the dish he celebrates 
has been accepted in France also, infrequent 
as have been French borrowings from the 
kitchens of other countries. Here are 
Mr. Meyer's verses — and it is chiefly in 
his final quatrain that he recalls the 
prescription of the earlier Englishman : — 
'Lobster a I'Americaine' : 

A lobster full of life you need, 
But, ere you further shall proceed, 
Drop him within a copper pot 
That's filled with water boiling-hot. 
When boiled, then him in eighths divide, 
Now turn these oft from side to side 
In butter simmering in a pan, 
And do this careful as you can. 
And salt and pepper ere you cease. 
Of garlic crush a little piece. 
This with a glass of Chablis add — 
Your lobster then cannot be bad. 
Skin six tomatoes and take out the seed ; 
Do this as thoroughly as it may need. 
Now with the lobster altogether cook, 
And that the mixture does not burn, oft look. 
i;o 



RECIPES IN RHYME 

A little spice would add unto the savor ; 

Bay-leaf and thyme have not too strong a flavor. 

And after thirty minutes on the fire 

The lobster's cooked. In peace you can retire. 

Invite your friends now to this treat 

'Twould tempt a dying man to eat; 

The sauce is better than the lobster, too. 

Such dishes are, you will agree with me, too few, 

This dainty feast would surely animate 

The most despondent, melancholic pate; 

He will give thanks when he in truth can say, 

" 'Twas Lobster a I'Americaine to-day." 

It is true that some iconoclast, ever swift 
to upset tradition, may be ready to prove 
that "lobster American style" is French, 
after all, and in spite of its name. But the 
nationality of another preparation of shell- 
fish is indisputable; and the rollicking 
rhymester who has lyrically recorded the 
proper method to be employed in its con- 
coction would stand revealed as an Ameri- 
can, even though his name was wholly 
unknown. For where else do clams dwell 
except in America? They are citizens of 
the United States by nativity; and it was 
a worthy patriotism that inspired Mr. W. 
171 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

A. Croffut to proclaim the transcendent 
and most appetizing flavor of 'Clam Soup' : 

First catch your clam — along the ebbing edges 
Of saline coves you'll find the precious wedges, 
With backs up, lurking in the sandy bottom ; 
Pull in your iron rake, and lo ! you've got 'em. 
Take thirty large ones, put a basin under, 
And cleave with knife the stony jaws asunder; 
Add water (three quarts) to the native liquor, 
Bring to a boil (and, by the war, the quicker 
It boils the better, if you'd do it cutely). 
Now add the clams, chopped up and minced min- 
utely. 
Allow a longer boil of just three minutes. 
And while it bubbles quickly stir within its 
Tumultuous depths, where still the mollusks mutter, 
Four tablespoons of flour and four of butter, 
A pint of milk, some pepper to your notion. 
And clams need salting, although born of ocean. 
Remove from fire (if much boiled they will suffer, 
You'll find that India-rubber isn't tougher) ; 
After 'tis off, add three fresh eggs well beaten. 
Stir once more, and it's ready to be eaten. 
Fruit of the wave ! oh, dainty and delicious ! 
Food for the gods ! ambrosia for Apicius ! 
Worthy to thrill the soul of sea-born Venus, 
Or titillate the palate of Silenus. 

It is not in the United States, but in 
Great Britain, that one must seek the song- 
172 



RECIPES IN RHYME 

stcr of the swan. The cygnets of Norwich 
are eaten before the end of November, 
being cooked on a spit according to the 
directions thus rhythmically preserved: 

Take three pounds of beef fat, beat in a mortar. 
Put it into the swan, that is, when you've caught her; 
Some pepper, salt, mace, some nutmeg, an onion. 
Will heighten the flavor in gourmand's opinion. 
Then tie up tight with a small piece of tape. 
That the gravy and other things may not escape. 
A meal paste, rather thick, should be laid on the 

breast, 
And some whited brown paper should cover the rest. 
Fifteen minutes at least ere the swan you take down ; 
Pull the paste oflf the bird that the breast may get 

brown. 

The Gravy 

To a gravy of beef, good and strong, I opine, 
You'd be right if you add half a pint of port wine: 
Pour this through the swan ; yes, quite through the 

belly; 
Then serve the whole up with some hot currant jelly. 

Would not the opinion of Pythagoras 
concerning wild fowl have been modified 
perforce if he hud ever tasted a young 
swan thus artfully prepared — or if he had 
ever had the good fortune to find before 
^73 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

him the even more toothsome canvasback 
duck, as yet unsung by any bard? 

Hawthorne has told us of a dream he 
had once "that the world had become dis- 
satisfied with the inaccurate manner in 
which facts are reported, and had employed 
him at a salary of a thousand dollars 
to relate things of importance exactly as 
they happen." Here is a valuable sugges- 
tion, fit for instant use. If any philan- 
thropist is at a loss how to lay out his 
money to advantage, let him employ half 
a dozen or half a score of minor poets, 
deft in the adjustment of rhymes, and set 
them to singing the praises of the good 
things of life and to putting into immortal 
verse the best ways of cooking this or that 
delectable dish. Thus should the lyrist 
and the culinary artist collaborate for the 
benefit of posterity. Men of science tell 
us that rhymes and jingles linger in the ear 
longer than mere prose; and recipes likely 
to be lost if left in perishable prose might 
aspire to a lofty longevity if fixed In verse. 
174 



RECIPES IN RHYME 

Here is a case in point. The sack-posset 
is now no longer concocted; and even the 
most learned compounder of American 
drinks would be puzzled if a sack-posset 
were suddenly demanded. Yet, though 
the thing itself be vanished from the face 
of the earth, the formula used in mixing 
it has survived in verse for now more than 
a century and a half. In February, 1744, 
in the Gazette of Bradford, the New York 
printer gave "a receipt for all young ladies 
that have an eye to matrimony," — 'To 
Make a Sack- Posset' : 

From famed Barbados, on the western main, 

Fetch sugar half a pound ; fetch sack from Spain 

A pint ; and from the East India coast 

Nutmeg, the glory of our Northern toast; 

O'er flaming coals together let them heat 

Till the all-conquering sack dissolves the sweet; 

O'er such another fire set eggs, twice ten, 

New born, the product of the wedded hen ; 

Stir them with steady hand, and conscience pricking 

To see the untimely fate of twenty chicken ; 

From shining shelf take down your brazen skillet, 

A quart of milk from gentle cow will fill it; 

When boiled and cooled, put milk and sack to egg, 

175 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Unite them firmly like the triple league ; 

Then, covered close, together let them dwell 

Till miss twice sings, "You must not kiss and 

tell," 
Then, lad and lass, snatch up your eager spoon, 
And fall on fiercely, like a starved dragoon. 

Although this has been borrowed from 
one of the earhest of American newspapers, 
its authorship is probably British; indeed, 
one may doubt whether there was in all 
his Majesty's colonies in 1744 any one hav- 
ing command over light and easy versifica- 
tion of this sort. The technical skill of the 
Bacchanalian instructor may not be worthy 
of the very highest praise, yet, none the less, 
it is beyond the possession of any of the 
American versifiers of that early day, — 
even if they had deigned to bestow their 
attention upon the poetic aspects of the 
culinary art. 

After the lapse of a century and a half, 
more than one lyrist has arisen in the 
United States ready to preserve in verse 
the proper method of preparing one or 
another of the American national dishes. 
176 



RECIPES IN RHYME 

The doughnut, the descendant of the Dutch 
oilcake, that first cousin of the Knicker- 
bocker cruller: 

One cup of sugar, one cup of milk; 

Two eggs beaten fine as silk, 

Salt and nutmegs (lemon '11 do) ; 

Of baking-powder, teaspoons two. 

Lightly stir the flour in ; 

Roll in pie-board not too thin ; 

Cut in diamonds, twists, or rings. 

Drop with care the doughy things 

Into fat that briskly swells 

Evenly the spongy cells. 

Watch with care the time for turning; 

Fry them brown — just short of burning. 

Roll in sugar, serve when cool. 

Price — a quarter for this rule. 

And even corn-pone has been embalmed 
in rhyme by a right reverend bard — the 
corn-pone which the white American rarely 
gets nowadays, although the red American 
rarely made it (or its equivalent) before 
the white American came across the At- 
lantic, and although the black American 
best appreciates the delicacy of its proper 
preparation. It was an American Bishop 
177 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

(William of Connecticut) who followed 
the ecclesiastical precedent of the English 
dean, and proclaimed the only true way 
of making the humble dish : 

Take a cup of corn-meal, and the meal should be 

yellow ; 
Add a cup of wheat flour for to make the corn 

mellow ; 
Of sugar a cup, white or brown or your pleasure, 
(The color is nothing, the fruit is the measure) ; 

And now comes a troublesome thing to indite. 
For the rhyme and the reason they trouble me quite ; 
For after the sugar, the flour, and the meal 
Comes a cup of sour cream, but unless you should 

steal 
From your neighbors, I fear you will never be able 
This item to put upon your cook's table: 
For "sure and indeed," in all town I rem'ember. 
Sour cream is as scarce as June buds in December. 

So here an alternative nicely contrived 

Is suggested your mind to relieve. 
And showing how you without stealing at all 

The ground that is lost may retrieve. 
Instead of sour cream take one cup of milk, 

"Sweet milk!" what a sweet phrase to utter! 
And to make it creamlike put into the cup 

Just three tablespoonfuls of butter. 



RECIPES IN RHYME 

Cream of tartar, one teaspoonful, rules dietic — 

How nearly I wrote it down tartar emetic ! — 

But no; cream of tartar it is without doubt, 

And so the alternative makes itself out. 

Of soda the half of a teaspoonful add, 

Or else your poor corn cake will go to the bad ; 

Two eggs must be broken without being beat. 

Then of salt a teaspoonful your work will complete. 

Twenty minutes of baking are needful to bring 

To the point of perfection this "awful good thing." 

To eat at the best this remarkable cake 

You should fish all day long on the royal-named 

lake, 
With the bright waters glancing in glorious light 
And beauties outnumbered bewild'ring your sight, 
On mountain and lake, in water and bay ; 
And then, when the shadows fall down from on high, 
Seek "Sabbath Day Point," as the light fades away, 
And end with this feast the angler's long day. 
Then, there will you find, without any question. 
That an appetite honest awaits on digestion. 

British again are the three following, 
clipped years ago from a newspaper and 
derived originally, it may be, from the 
collection of Mr. Punch. They are entitled 
'Extracts from the Commonplace-Book of 
a Connoisseur' ; and the first is a recipe 
for 'Pigeon Soup' : 

179 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

"Eight pigeons take, all pluck, and two, the worst, 
Review, i.e., cut up. and drown the pair 
In water that will fill a large tureen. 
Necks, gizzards, pinions, livers of the rest 
Add, and boil well, and strain. Season the birds. 
But part dissected, with your pungent spice. 
Mixed spice and salt — English, you understand, 
Not attic; that, perchance, you lack — and then 
Truss them as if their little toes were cold, 
Legs into belly. Pick and wash and shred 
Parsley, young onions, spinach eke; and grate 
Bread, say a handful. In the frying-pan 
A lump of butter put, and when it boils. 
Throw in your bread, and, mind you, do it brown. 
Put on the stock to boil, and add the birds. 
Herbs, and fried bread, and when the doves are done, 
Of course they may be dished. 

— 'Massacre of the Innocents.' 

The second considers *Cocky Leeky': 

Scrag of mutton, shank of veal. 
From the butcher where you deal ; 
Good beef stock is even better — 
Now, then, follow to the letter: 
Portly fowl, with leeks, say three, 
Pepper, salt, judiciously. 
Leeks cut up in inch-long pieces; 
Slowly boil. When it decreases, 
After a good hour or more. 
Add three sliced leeks as before. 
i8o 



RECIPES IN RHYME 

One hour longer let it bubble, 
It will pay you for your trouble. 
If you've followed as you should, 
You'll declare the stuff is good. 

— 'Macbeth' ( improved ) . 

And the third deals with 'Stewed 
Oysters' : 

Friend am I, and not foe, and yet men beard me, 
And boil my beard in my own juice with gravy; 
Strain off my beard, and put mc in instead, 
Thicken the mess with flour and ounce of butter, 
Kill my ambrosial flavor with their ketchup 
(White wine, anchovy, lemon, what you will). 
Nutmeg, and salt and pepper, mace and cream; 
Simmer and serve me up on toasted sippets. 
They will not let me boil, but my blood boils 
At thought of how, while they would paint the lily, 
Pepsine and piquant coolness both must perish. 

— 'The Foreboding Native.' 

And at the end of this crisscrossing of 
the northern ocean, with quotations first 
from British bards and then from American 
artists in metre, it is to New York that a 
return is necessary again to quote here the 
chaplet of couplets written by the American 
who in his day enjoyed the widest fame as 
i8i 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

a gastronomist, the late Samuel Ward, once 
a banker in New York and later a lobbyist 
in Washington — and always a good liver 
and a good fellow. He called them 'Verses 
for the Kitchen' : 

Always have lobster sauce with salmon, 
And put mint sauce your roasted lamb on. 

In dressing salad mind this law — 

With two hard yolks use one that's raw. 

Roast veal with rich stock gravy serve; 
And pickled mushrooms, too, observe. 

Roast pork, sans apple sauce, past doubt 
Is 'Hamlet' with the Prince left out. 

Your mutton chops with paper cover 
And make them amber brown all over. 

Broil lightly your beefsteak — to fry it 
Argues contempt of Christian diet. 

To roast spring chicken is to spoil 'em — 
Just split 'em down the back and broil 'em. 

It gives true epicures the vapors 
To see boiled mutton minus capers. 
182 



RECIPES IN RHYME 

The cook deserves a hearty cuffing 

Who serves roast fowls with tasteless stuffing. 

Smelts require egg and biscuit powder — 
Don't put fat pork in your clam chowder. 

Egg sauce — few make it right, alas ! 
Is good with bluefish or with bass. 

Nice oyster sauce gives zest to cod — 
A fish, when fresh, to feast a god. 

But one might rhyme for weeks this way. 
And still have lots of things to say. 

And so I'll close, for, reader mine, 
This is about the hour I dine. 



Whether these 'Verses for the Kitchen' 
are fairly to be included under the title of 
this paper may be a matter of dispute; but 
not to be debated is the fact that they are 
far better in manner and in matter than 
most of the other gastronomic effusions here 
collected. They have the calm ease of a 
man who knew what he was talking about 
183 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

and who thought his opinion on the subject 
worthy of condensation into couplets, as 
sharp as carving-knives should be. 

The things we eat by various juice controul, 
The Narrowness or Largeness of the soul. 
Onions will make ev'n Heirs or Widows weep. 
The tender Lettice brings on softer Sleep. 
Eat Beef or Pye-crust if you'd serious be; 
Your shell-fish raises Venus from the Sea ; 
For Nature that inclines to 111 or Good, 
Still nourishes our Passions by our Food. 

So wrote the author of the 'Art of Cook- 
ery,' in imitation of Horace's 'Art of 
Poetry,' a work which is ascribed to the 
ingenious Dr. King; which was printed in 
London in 1709 for Bernard Lintott, at 
the Cross Keys between the two Temple 
Gates in Fleet Street; and which was 
humbly inscribed to the Honourable Beef 
Steak Club. 

With one more quotation from Dr. 
King's sapient pages — if, indeed, this 'Art 
of Cookery' be of his inditing — this cul- 
inary anthology may fitly close : 
184 



RECIPES IN RHYME 

'Tis a sage Question, if the Art of Cooks 

Is lodg'd by Nature, or attained by Books; 

That Man will never frame a noble Treat 

Whose whole Dependence lies on some Receipt. 

Then by pure Nature ev'ry thing is spoil'd, 

She knows no more than stew'd, bak'd, roast, and 

boil'd. 
When Art and Nature join th' effect will be 
Some nice Ragoust, or charming Fricasy. 
(1900). 



185 



X 



THE UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF 
H. C. BUNNER 

THE late H. C. Bunner published 
two volumes of poetry, 'Airs 
from Arcady' and 'Rowen: Sec- 
ond-Crop Songs.' But only a 
small proportion of his verse, comic and 
serious, is contained in these two little 
books. He was always modest in discus- 
sing his own work, in prose or in verse, 
yet he was ambitious also; and when he 
came to choose out those of his writings 
which he was willing to reprint in book 
form, he held up a high standard for him- 
self. When his first volume of short 
stories, *In Partnership,' was ready for the 
printer he became dissatisfied with one of 
his stories, and withdrew it, writing in its 
stead the vigorous and pathetic tale called 



UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 

*A Letter and a Paragraph.' There is 
also a long serial story, contributed to a 
weekly paper, which he refused always to 
reprint as a book, although it was an ab- 
sorbingly dramatic narrative. In selecting 
from his own verse he was even more par- 
ticular. Perhaps this was due to the fact 
that he was widely known as the editor 
of Puck, and that if he had reprinted all 
of even the best of his humorous verse 
he would have been accepted only as a 
comic poet. He was unwilling to have 
the graceful and imaginative lyrics which 
give distinction to 'Airs from Arcady' and 
'Rowen' swamped by an undue proportion 
of his lighter verse. In neither of these 
volumes did he include any of his more 
broadly comic pieces — like this sonnet, 
for example, in which the reader is left 
in doubt as to what manner of vessel it 
is the poet is addressing: — 'To a Schooner'. 

O Brave and Beautiful ! the purling foam 
Curls clinging with caressing touch around 
Thy curves symmetrical. My heart doth bound 

187 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

At sight of thee — 'neath native heavens' dome, 
Or far abroad, where venturous Teutons roam. 

Moist thy smooth sides as swiftly, without sound, 

Across the Bar thou passest, brimmed and crowned 
With thy rich freight, dearer than musty tome 
To student's heart ; sweet as the honey-comb. 

Not wondrous caverns underneath the ground, 
Dark treasure-caves of subterranean gnome, 

Yield fairer boon than in thee I have found — 
Peace ! O, my blissful spirit's cherished home. 

In yon dark flood lies Care forever drowned ! 

A pleasant flavor of the classics lingers 
about the lines in which the poet set down 
his dissatisfaction with 'Atlantic City': 

O City that is not a city, unworthy the prefix At- 
lantic, 

Forlornest of watering-places, and thoroughly Phila- 
delphian ! 

In thy despite I sing, with a bitter and deep detesta- 
tion — 

A detestation born of a direful and dinnerless even- 
ing. 

Spent in thy precincts unhallowed — an evening I 
trust may recur not. 

Never till then did I know what was meant by the 
word god-forsaken : 

Thou its betokening hast taught me, being the 
chiefest example. 

i88 



UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 

Thou art the scorned of the gods ; thy sand from 
their sandals is shaken ; 

Thee have they left in their wrath to thy uninter- 
esting extensivencss, 

Barren and bleak and big; a wild aggregation of 
barracks, 

Miscalled hotels, and of dovecotes denominate cot- 
tages ; 

A confusion of ugly girls, of sand, and of health- 
bearing breezes. 

With one unending plank-walk for a true Philadel- 
phia "attraction." 

City ambitiously named, why, with inducements 
delusive. 

Is the un-Philadelphian stranger lured to thy desert 
pretentious? 

'Tis not alone that thy avenues, broad and unpaved 
and unending, 

Re-echo yet with the obsolete music of 'Pinafore,' 

Whistled in various keys by the rather too numerous 
negro ; 

'Tis not alone that Propriety — Propriety too Phila- 
delphian — 

Over thee stretches an sgis of wholly superfluous 
virtue ; 

That thou art utterly good; hast no single vice to 
redeem thee ; 

Tis not alone that thou art provincial in all things, 
and petty ; 

And that the dulness of death is gay, compared to 
thy dulness — 

189 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

'Tis not alone for these things that my curse is to 
rest upon thee : 

But for a sin that crowns thee with perfect and emi- 
nent badness ; 

Sets thee alone in thy shame, the unworthiest town 
on the sea-coast : 

This : that thou dinest at Noon, and then in a man- 
ner barbarian, 

Soupless and wmeless and coffeeless, untimely and 
wholly indecent — 

As is the custom, I learn, in Philadelphia proper. 

I rose and I fled from thy Supper; I said: "I will get 
me a Dinner!" 

Vainly I wandered thy streets : thy eating-places un- 
godly 

Knew not the holiness of Dinner ; in all that evening 
I dined not ; 

But in a strange low lair, infested of native me- 
chanics. 

Bolted a fried beef-steak for the physical need of my 
stomach. 

And for them that have fried that steak, in Aides' 
lowest back-kitchen 

May they eternally broil, by way of a warning to 
others. 

During my wanderings, I met, and hailed with de- 
light one Italian, 

A man with a name from 'Pasquale' — the chap sung 
by Tagliapietra — 

He knew what it was to dine ; he comprehended my 
yearnings ; 

190 



UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 

But the spell was also on him; the somnolent spell 
Philadelphian ; 

And his hostelry would not be open till Saturday 
next ; and I cursed him. 

Now this is not too much to ask, God knows, that a 
mortal should want a 

Pint of Bordeaux to his dinner, and a small cigar- 
ette for a climax : 

But, these things being denied him, where then is 
your Civilization? 

O Coney Island ! of old I have reviled and blas- 
phemed thee, 

For that thou dowsest thy glim at an hour that is un- 
metropolitan ; 

That thy frequenters' feet turn townwards ere strik- 
eth eleven, 

When the returning cars are filled with young men 
and maidens. 

Most of the maidens asleep on the young men's cin- 
dery shoulders — 

Yea, but I spake as a fool, insensate, disgruntled, 
ungrateful : 

Thee will I worship henceforth in appreciative hu- 
mility: 

Luxurious and splendid and urban, glorious and gas- 
lit and gracious. 

Gathering from every land thy gay and ephemeral 
tenantry, 

From the Greek who hails thee: "Thalatta!" to the 
rustic who murmurs "My Golly!" 

From the Bowery youth who requests his sweetheart 
to "look at them billers !" 
191 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

To the Gaul whom thy laughing waves almost per- 
suade to immersion : 

O Coney Island, thou art the weary citizen's 
heaven — 

A heaven to dine, not die in, joyful and restful and 
clamful, 

Better one hour of thee than an age of Atlantic 
City! 

And the same flavor, more pronounced, 
is discoverable also in the daring rhymes 
on 'Classic Journalism': 

The beautiful garland of justice awaits 
The eminent poet and general, Socrates. 
Krophutikos Graphikos. 

5th Century b. c. 

A great thing was journalism in Greece, 
When that nation was foremost in war and in peace. 
I was long on the staff of the Athens Courier, 
And the style the boys ran the machine you shall 

hear. 
The boss paper it was the South-Spartan Tribune, 
Which was owned by a man of the name of Laocoon ; 
And had a grand building, where down the two sides 
Ran two rows of extra-sized Caryatides. 
'Twas a very fine sheet, with a half-page of locals, 
Done up in neat style by J. Themistocles. 
At the top of its columns, its letter-heads, bills, 
192 



UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 

It flaunted the name of its founder, Achilles. 

'Twas so high-toned, the boys used to say its chief 

writer 
Was nobody less than Olympian Jupiter. 
The staff boasted ladies galore, Hermione 
Ran the fashion column entirely alone. 
Cybele did the Art notes; the critical flail 
Was skilfulUy wielded by Mrs. Omphale. 
But the Boeotian Herald beat this a long sight, 
By engaging on glorious terms Aphrodite. 
And the Herald had Hero, who later demeaned her- 
Self by receiving the visits of Leander. 
The East-Acarnanian Times made its gains 
By the aid and assistance of Aristophanes. 
When the Greeks sent their troops against Troy's 

forces meagre. 
The Times dispatched war-correspondent Meleager. 
Then there was the Attican World, that shocked 

Greece, 
By opening its columns to Trojan ^neas; 
But its editor well knew his sheet how to carry on ; 
Had a competent musical critic in Arion ; 
And knowing public fancy a feuilleton tickles. 
He secured for that duty the well known Pericles. 
The proprietor, he was a fellow of means, 
Senior partner of Apollo and Diogenes. 
Ah, those were great times, but they're all long gone 

by. 
Like the days when I used to be sweet on Clytie ; 
And Greek journalism has vanished beneath 
The silent, oblivious waters of Lethe. 

193 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

This had been suggested by the couplet 
quoted from Mr. W. A. Croffut, who was 
then contributing to the now departed 
Daily Graphic. Another copy of verses 
had its origin in the allegation that a cer- 
tain songster of the Sierras had written 
a poem in which the name of the author 
of 'Faust' was made to rhyme with the 
unpoetic word teeth. The American hu- 
morist unhesitatingly mispronounced the 
names Moliere and Goethe, and wrote 
these stanzas on 'Shake, Mulleary and 

Go-ethe.' 

I. 

I have a bookcase, which is what 
Many much better men have not. 
There are no books inside, for books, 
I am afraid, might spoil its looks. 
But I've three busts, all second-hand, 
Upon the top. You understand 
I could not put them underneath — 
Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe. 

II. 

Shake was a dramatist of note; 
He lived by writing things to quote, 
He long ago put on his shroud : 
194 



UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 

Some of his works arc rather loud. 
His bald-spot's dusty, I suppose. 
I know there's dust upon his nose. 
I'll have to give each nose a sheath — 
Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe. 

III. 

Mulleary's line was quite the same ; 
He has more hair; but far less fame. 
I would not from that fame retrench — 
But he is foreign, being French. 
Yet high his haughty head he heaves, 
The only one done up in leaves. 
They're rather limited on wreath — 
Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe. 

IV. 

Go-ethe wrote in the German tongue: 
He must have learned it very young. 
His nose is quite a but for scoflf. 
Although an inch of it is off. 
He did quite nicely for the Dutch; 
But here he doesn't count for much. 
They all are off their native heath — 
Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe. 

V. 

They sit there, on their chests, as bland 
As if they were not second-hand. 
I do not know of what they think, 

195 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Nor why they never frown or wink. 

But why from smiling they refrain 

I think I clearly can explain : 

They none of them could show much teeth — 

Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe. 

In the early days of Puck the young 
poet chose to consider himself a dweller 
in the coast of Bohemia ; and yet in more 
than one of his poems of this period he 
seems to have anticipated the time when 
he should remove from the seaport of 
Prague. This feeling is reflected more 
fully in the verses which he entitled 'Wed' 
than in any other of his poems, excepting 
only, it may be, that called the 'Deserter.' 
Here is 'Wed': 

For these white arms about my neck — 

For the dainty room, with its ordered grace — 
For my snowy linen without a fleck — 

For the tender charm of this uplift face — 

For the softened light and the homelike air — 

The low luxurious cannel fire — 
The padded ease of my chosen chair — 

The devoted love that discounts desire — 
196 



UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 

T sometimes think, when Twelve is struck 
By the clock on the mantel, tinkling clear, 

I would take — and thank the gods for the luck — 
One single hour with the Boys and the Beer. 

Where the sawdust scent of a cheap saloon 
Is mingled with malt; where each man smokes, 

Where they sing the street songs out of tune, 
Talk Art, and bandy ephemeral jokes. 

By Jove, I do! And all the time 

I know not a man that is there to-night 

But would barter his brains to be where I'm — 
And I'm well aware that the beggars are right. 

And here Is its fellow lyric, the 'De- 
serter' : 

Scene. — In Bohemia. 

Glad? Don't I say so? Aren't your fingers numb 
where 
They've felt the home-returning wanderer's grip? 
Sit down? I will. 

Put my umbrella somewhere 
Where it won't drip. 

My book — that parcel — thanks ! What is it ? Mrs. 

Barbauld's — no, I mean, Plato's Nursery 
Rhymes — 
Burton's Anat — oh, never mind it! This is 
Just like old times. 

197 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Thank you, I ivill take something. No, not whiskey. 
I've cut that — oh dear, yes, of course! from 
choice. 
One lemonade ! Jove ! I feel younger — frisky — 
One of the boys. 

Give an account? Oh, I've been quite the rover 
These two years — yes, I've only just got home. 
Set out in April. Roughish passage over. 
Went first to Rome. 

I stayed in Paris longer than I meant to: 

(I had to break the trip there coming back 
From Rome.) Bonn was the next place that I went 
to- 
Met you there. Jack. 

You, with an ancient relative and a Murray — 
Relative's dead? I hope he ... . ? Ah, that's 
right ! 
I say, what made you leave in such a hurry, 
On Christmas night? 

I got engaged that last week in December. 

— Didn't you meet the Carletons in Bordeaux? 
You knew the girls. Mine's Florry. You remem- 
ber — 

The blonde, you know. 

You — what ? God bless me ! And you were refused, 
eh? 

198 



UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 

Of course you were. That's why you looked so 
blue 
That Christmas? Ya-as ! I called the following 
Tuesday. 

Sorry for you. 
Hope, though, since then, some fair maid has con- 
soled you? 

No? Deuce you say. Poor fellow, that's too bad. 
My wife — 

Of course I am! Hadn't I told you? 
I thought I had. 

Ah, boys ! These pleasant memories stealing o'er 
me — 
I think I will take a Cabana now. 
Thank you, old man. . . . 

You'll have to roll it for me — 
I forget how. 

Well, this is pleasant. 'Bacco, tales vivacious, 
And beer. From youth's free spring once more I 
quaff, 
A wild Bohemian. 

Five o'clock ? Good — gracious ! 
So much? I'm off ! 

No, positively can't. My wife — my dinner. 
Always in, evenings ; people sometimes call. 
(Here, Jack ! one word — no grudge against the 
winner? 

Shake!) 

Good-bye, all ! 
199 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

And — I suppose my small domestic heaven 

Wouldn't much interest you? If it did — 
Fellows ! come up next Sunday — tea at seven — 
And .... 

see .... 

my kid. 
[Quick Curtain.] 

As these specimens of his stanzas indi- 
cate, the editor of Puck contributed to its 
columns verses of various kinds, sometimes 
broadly comic, sometimes delicately play- 
ful. His range included "comic copy" 
neatly rhymed and also the more fanciful 
vers de societe. As an example of this 
more difficult variety may be taken the 
sequence of couplets which he called 'In- 
teresting' : 

I rowed her out on the broad bright sea, 
Till the land lay purple upon our lee. 

The heavens were trying the waves to outshine, 
With never a cloud to the far sea-line. 

On the reefs the billows in kisses broke — 
But oh, I was dying for one small smoke. 

She spoke of the gulls and the waters green — 
But what is nature to Nicotine? 
200 



UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 

She spoke of the tides, and the Triton myth ; 
And said Jones was engaged to the blonde Miss 
Smith. 

She spoke of her liking lemon on clams ; 
And Euclid, and parallelograms. 

For her face was fair and her eyes were brown, 
And she was a girl from Boston town. 

And I rowed and thought — but I never said — 
"Does Havana tobacco trouble your head?" 

She talked of algae — she talked of sand — 
And I thought : "Tobacco you cannot stand." 

She talked of the ocean-steamers' speed — 
And I yearned for a whiflf of the wicked weed. 

And at last I spoke, between fright and fret: 
"Would you mind if I smoked a cigarette?" 

She dropped her eyes on the ocean's blue, 

And said: "Would you mind if / smoked too?" 

Not all of his ^'ers de societe were con- 
tributed to Puck; many of them were pub- 
lished by the Century, which was then 
known as Scribner's Monthly. Among 
these was one poem which "went the rounds 

201 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

of the papers" when it first appeared, but 
which has since dropped out of sight, since 
its author refrained from reprinting it; 'In 
a Paris Restaurant' : 

I gaze, while thrills my heart with patriot pride, 

Upon the exquisite skin, rose-flushed and creamy; 
The perfect little head ; on either side 

Blonde waves. The dark eyes, vaguely soft and 
dreamy, 
Hold for a space my judgment in eclipse, 

Until with half a pout, supremely dainty, 
"He's real mean" — slips from out the strawberry 
lips — 

"Oh, ain't he?" 

This at her escort, youthful, black-moustached 

And diamond-studded — this reproof, whereat he 
Is not to any great extent abashed. 

(That youth's from "Noo Orleens" or "Cincin- 
natty," 
I'm sure.) But she — those dark eyes doubtful 
strike 
Her sherbet-ice .... Won't touch it. . . . Is in- 
duced to. 
Result: "I'd sooner eat Mince-Pie, Jim, like 
We used to." 

While then my too-soon-smitten soul recants, 
I hear her friend discoursing with much feeling 



UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 

Of tailors, and a garment he calls "pants." 
I note into her eyes a softness stealing — 
A shade of thought upon her low, sweet brow — 
She hears him not — I swear, I could have cried 
here — 
The escort nudges her — she starts, and — "How? 
The t'deer !" 

This was the finishing and final touch. 
I rose, and took no further observation. 
I love my country "just about" as much — 

I have for it as high a veneration — 
As a man whose fathers fought for liberty. 

Whose veins conduct the blood of Commodore 
Perry, can. 
But she was quite too very awfully 
American. 

To this magazine was also contributed 
a group of poems in the fixed forms which 
the younger versifiers of that day had just 
imported from France via England. The 
pathetic little triolet on a 'Pitcher of 
Mignonette,' the rondels 'She was a Beauty' 
and 'Ready for the Ride,' a rondeau or 
two, he preserved in his first volume of 
verse; but the most daring of them all, a 
triumphant chant-royal, always seemed to 
203 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

him to be too broadly humorous to be 
worthy of inclusion among his other poems, 
and yet in no other chant-royal in English 
have the difficulties of the form been more 
ingeniously or more successfully overcome. 
He gave it a flambuoyant title, 'Behold the 
Deeds' : 

[Being the Plaint of Adolphe Culpepper Ferguson, 
Salesman of Fancy Notions, held in durance of his 
Landlady for a "failure to connect" on Saturday 
night.] 

I. 

I would that all men my hard case might know, 

How grievously I suffer for no sin : 
I, Adolphe Culpepper Ferguson, for lo ! 

I of my landlady am locked in, 
For being short on this sad Saturday, 
Nor having shekels of silver wherewith to pay : 
She has turned and is departed with my key ; 
Wherefore, not even as other boarders free, 

I sing (as prisoners to their dungeon-stones 
When for ten days they expiate a spree) ; 

Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones! 

II. • 

One night and one day have I wept my woe ; 
Nor wot I, when the morrow doth begin, 

2C4 



UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 

If I shall have to write to Briggs & Co., 
To pray them to advance the requisite tin 
For ransom of their salesman, that he may 
Go forth as other boarders go alway — 

As those I hear now flocking from their tea, 
Led by the daughter of my landlady 

Piano-ward. This day, for all my moans, 
Dry bread and water have been served me. 

Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones ! 

in. 

Miss Amabel Jones is musical, and so 

The heart of the young he-boarder doth win, 
Playing "The Maiden's Prayer," adagio — 

That fetcheth him, as fetcheth the "bunko skin" 
The innocent rustic. For my part, I pray : 
That Badarjewska maid may wait for aye 
Ere sits she with a lover, as did we 
Once sit together, Amabel ! Can it be 

That all that arduous wooing not atones 
For Saturday shortness of trade dollars three? 

Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones ! 

IV. 

Yea ! she forgets the arm that was wont to go 
Around her waist. She wears a buckle, whose 
pin 
Galleth the crook of the young man's elbow. 
/ forget not, for I that youth have been. 
Smith was aforetime the Lothario gay. 
Yet once, I mind me. Smith was forced to stay 
205 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Close in his room. Not calm, as I, was he; 
But his noise brought no pleasaunce, verily. 

Small ease he gat of playing on the bones 
Or hammering on his stove-pipe, that I see. 

Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones! 

V. 

Thou, for whose fear the figurative crow 

I eat, accursed be thou and all thy kin ! 
Thee will I show up — yea, up will I show 
Thy too thick buckwheats, and thy tea too thin. 
Ay ! here I dare thee, ready for the fray : 
Thou dost not "keep a first-class house," I say f 
It dost not with the advertisements agree. 
Thou lodgest a Briton with a puggaree. 

And thou hast harbored Jacobses and Cohns, 
Also a Mulligan. Thus denounce I thee ! 
Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones! 



Boarders ! the worst I have not told to ye : 
She hath stolen my trousers, that I may not flee 

Privily by the window. Hence these groans. 
There is no fleeing in a robe de nuit. 

Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones ! 

Bunner's literary executor, the friend 
with whom he had written 'In Partner- 
ship' and to whom he had dedicated 'Airs 
206 



UNCOLLECTED POEMS OF H. C. BUNNER 

from Arcady,' made a choice from the 
verses which had not been published when 
the poet died and also from a brilliant 
series of 'Ballads of the Town,' which had 
been contributed from time to time, to the 
pages of Puck; and these winnowed lyrics 
were appended to the definitive edition of 
Bunner's 'Poems,' a single volume which in- 
cluded both 'Airs from Arcady' and 
'Rowen: Second-Crop Songs.' But none 
of the poems, grave or gay, which the 
author himself had seen fit to reject him- 
self, were allowed to find a place in this 
final volume, by which he will be judged 
in the future. Yet these outcast verses 
are not unworthy of their writer; and it 
has seemed a pity to let them slip into the 
swift oblivion of the back-number. They 
may be rescued here, even though they 
must not ever be included in the book 
which bears the poet's own name. After 
all, the author ought to have some rights, 
and he ought to be able to pick and choose 
those of his own writings by which he is 
207 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

willing to be judged. His feeling has been 
finely phrased by Mr. Aldrich : 

Take what thou wilt, a lyric or a line, 

Take all, take nothing, — and God send thee cheer ! 
But my anathema on thee and thine 

If thou add'st aught to what is printed here! 

(1896). 



208 



XI 

THE STRANGEST FEAT OF 
MODERN MAGIC 

IN the extremely interesting address of 
Dr. Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., as pres- 
ident of the Society for Psychical 
Research, which is printed in the 
proceedings of the Society for March, 
1902, there is a careful scientific considera- 
tion of various alleged occurrences which 
seem to be contrary to the laws of nature as 
we now understand them. Professor Lodge 
discusses the proper attitude of a man of 
science toward these alleged phenomena; 
and he deplores the inveterate antagonism 
between orthodox science and the accumu- 
lating evidence that certain phenomena do 
occur now and again which seem to be con- 
trary to natural custom. He explains this 
antagonism as due to the fact that "Science 
209 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

has a horror of the unintelligible; it can 
make nothing of a capricious and disor- 
derly agent, and it prefers to Ignore the ex- 
istence of any such," 

But the attempt to ignore is in itself un- 
scientific. It is the duty of Science to know 
— to know all that is to be known — and 
continually to extend the boundaries of 
knowledge, even though it is unable always 
to explain the immediate cause of every fact 
that it records. 

Then Professor Lodge dismisses as un- 
proved a host of alleged wonders of one 
kind or another, and he declares that full 
allowance must be made for "the ingenious 
and able impositions of a conjurer." He 
asserts that some of the psychical phenom- 
ena proclaimed to have occurred "bear a 
perilous resemblance to conjuring tricks," 
which can be very deceptive. He warns us 
that extreme caution is necessary, and full 
control must be allowed to the observers. 
He insists, moreover, that in so far as those 
professing to perform wonders demand 



STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 

their own conditions they must be content 
to be teated as conjurers. 

There is one marvel wrought by the 
greatest of modern conjurers of which we 
have a true record, left us by the performer 
himself, who has told us what it was that he 
seemed to do, but who has not explained 
how he was able to accomplish the extra- 
ordinary feat. Robert-Houdin was the 
creator of the latter-day methods of mod- 
ern magic; he was the inventor of many of 
the most ingenious and novel illusions, in- 
cluding the intricate and puzzling exhibi- 
tion known as "second-sight." He defined 
himself as "a comedian playing the charac- 
ter of a magician." Late in life he wrote 
an account of his many adventures; and 
these "Confidences of a Prestidigitator" are 
worthy of comparison with all but the very 
best autobiographies — if not with Cellini's 
and Franklin's, at least with Cibber's and 
Goldoni's. Robert-Houdin's life of him- 
self, quite as well as any of the others, 
would justify Longfellow's assertion that 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

"autobiography is what biography ought 
to be." 

The special feat of Robert-Houdin's 
which has been mentioned was devised by 
him for exhibition in a palace and before a 
king — circumstances which exclude all sug- 
gestion of collusion or confederacy on the 
part of the audience. He tells us that in 
1846 he was summoned to the Palace of 
Saint-Cloud to give a performance before 
Louis Philippe and the royal family. He 
had six days to make all his arrangements, 
and he invented one new trick for the occa- 
sion — a trick which could not possibly have 
been performed under any other circum- 
stances. He tells us that early on the ap- 
pointed morning a wagon from the royal 
stables came to fetch him (and his son, who 
assisted him), and to convey all his varied 
paraphernalia. A stage had been set up in 
one of the large saloons of the palace, the 
windows of which opened out on the broad 
and beautiful gardens, with their double 
rows of orange-trees, each growing in its 
212 



STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 

square box on wheels. A sentry was placed 
at the door to see that the conjurer was not 
disturbed In his preparations. The King 
himself dropped in once to ask the enter- 
tainer if he had everything necessary. 

At four o'clock in the afternoon, the 
King and the Queen, the members of the 
royal family, and a certain number of 
invited guests had assembled. The cur- 
tains were parted; and Robert-Houdin 
began to amuse and to puzzle his 
distinguished audience. He reserved for 
the end of his programme the so- 
called second-sight in which the son, blind- 
folded on the stage, named one after an- 
other all the objects which came into the 
father's hands, and even described them at 
length, giving the dates on coins and the 
inscriptions on watches. It was almost at 
the end of the programme, and just before 
the exhibition of second-sight, that Robert- 
Houdin accomplished the equally astonish- 
ing trick which he had invented for the oc- 
casion. In setting forth this feat we can 
213 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

follow his own accurate but summary ac- 
count in the autobiography. 

He began by borrowing half a dozen 
handkerchiefs from his noble spectators. 
These he took back to the stage and made 
into a package, which he left upon his table. 
Then he came down again among the audi- 
ence with a pack of blank visiting-cards in 
his hand. He distributed these here and 
there among the spectators, requesting 
every one who received a card to write the 
name of a place where he or she would like 
the handkerchiefs to be conveyed instantly 
and invisibly. When a sufficient number 
of these cards had been written to Insure a 
large variety of choice, Robert-Houdin 
gathered them up and went over to Louis 
Philippe, 

The conjurer asked the King to pick out 
three cards and then to decide to which of 
the three places designated thereon he de- 
sired to have the handkerchiefs transported. 

"Let us see," said the monarch, as he 
looked at the first card he had taken. Then 
214 



STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 

he read, "I desire that the handkerchiefs 
should be found under one of the candela- 
bra on the chimney." The King looked up 
and said, "That is too easy for a sorcerer." 
So he read the writing on the second card, 
"that the handkerchiefs should be carried 
to the dome of the Invalides." With his 
customary shrewdness the King commented 
on this, saying that it might suit if it was 
not a great deal too far away, "not for the 
handkerchiefs — but for us." 

Finally, Louis Philippe glanced at the 
third card, which he did not read aloud at 
once, as he had read the others. 

"Ah, ha!" he said, "I'm rather afraid 
that this would puzzle you ! Do you know 
what it proposes?" 

"Will your majesty be kind enough to 
inform me?" answered Robert-Houdin. 

"This card," answered the monarch, 
"expresses the wMsh that you should cause 
the handkerchiefs to pass inside the box in 
which an orange-tree is growing, the last 
one on the right." 

215 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

Robert-Houdin answered, promptly, "Is 
that all. Sire? Give the order and I will 
obey." 

"So be it," Louis Philippe responded; 
"I shall not be sorry to see a deed of magic. 
So I choose the box of the orange-tree." 

Then the King whispered an order or 
two, and several persons ran out promptly 
into the garden and stationed themselves 
about the orange-tree — "guarding against 
any fraud," as Robert-Houdin himself 
puts it. 

The magician went back on the stage, 
and, putting the package of handkerchiefs 
on the centre of his table, he covered it with 
a ground-glass bowl. Then, taking his 
wand, he tapped on the bowl and bade the 
handkerchiefs begone to their appointed 
place. When he lifted the glass the little 
package had disappeared; and in its stead 
there was a white turtle-dove with a ribbon 
about its neck. 

At this moment the King went swiftly to 
the glass door, through which he could see 
216 



STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 

out into the garden; he wanted to make 
sure that his messengers were keeping faith- 
ful guard over the orange-tree. 

Turning to the conjurer with an ironic 
smile, he said: "Ah, Monsieur le Sorcicr, 
I'm doubtful about the virtue of your magic 
wand!" 

Then the King gave orders to call the 
master-gardener and to tell him to open the 
box of the orange-tree at the end of the 
row on the right. 

The master-gardener came immediately; 
and although greatly astonished at the 
order, he began work at once on the 
front of the box. Soon he had removed 
one of the upright panels of which it was 
composed. 

Apparently he found the soil undisturb- 
ed, as he inserted his hand carefully in 
among the roots of the growing tree with- 
out discovering anything. 

Suddenly a cry of surprise broke from 
him ; and he withdrew his hand, holding a 
small iron casket eaten with rust. 
217 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

This strange treasure-trove, scraped clean 
of the soil that incrusted it, was brought in 
and placed on a little table near the King. 

"Well, monsieur," cried Louis Philippe, 
with a movement of impatient curiosity, 
"here's a box. Are the handkerchiefs con- 
tained in that, by some strange chance?" 

"Yes, Sire," the conjurer replied, with 
assurance. "They are there — and they 
have been there for a very long while !" 

"A long while?" returned the monarch; 
"how can that be, as it is not a quarter of 
an hour since the handkerchiefs were given 
to you?" 

"I cannot deny that. Sire," responded the 
magician; "but where would the magic be 
if I could not accomplish things absolutely 
incomprehensible? No doubt, your maj- 
esty will be even more surprised when I 
prove beyond all question that this casket 
and what it contains were deposited in the 
box of the orange-tree sixty years ago !" 

"I should like to be able to take your 
word for It," said the King, smiling; "but 
218 



STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 

really I cannot do that. In a case like this 
I shall insist on proof." 

"If your majesty will only open the iron 
casket," returned the conjurer, "you will 
find therein abundant proof of what I have 
asserted." 

"Before I can open the casket, I must 
have the key," objected the monarch. 

"You can have the key. Sire, whenever 
you please," explained the magician. "You 
have only to detach it from the neck of the 
turtle-dove." 

Louis Philippe untied the ribbon which 
was around the neck of the bird, and which 
held a little rusty key. With this the King 
hastily opened the casket. 

The first object that presented itself to 
the eyes of the monarch was a parchment. 
He took it up and opened it. This is what 
he read: 

^''To-day, June 6, 1786. 
^^This iron box, containing six handker- 
chiefs, was placed within the roots of an 
2ig 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

orange-tree by me, Balsamo, Count Cagli- 
ostro, to be used in the accomplishing of an 
act of magic, which shall be performed 
sixty years from to-day, before Louis Phi- 
lippe and his family." 

"Decidedly," remarked the monarch, 
now even more astonished, "this smacks of 
witchcraft. Nothing is lacking, since both 
the signature and seal of the celebrated sor- 
cerer are here at the bottom of this docu- 
ment, which, God forgive me, seems to 
smell of sulphur." 

To this gracious pleasantry of the sov- 
ereign the courtiers paid the proper tribute 
of laughter. 

Then the King took from out the box a 
carefully sealed package of parchment. 

"Is it possible," he asked, "that the 
handkerchiefs are wrapped in this?" 

"Indeed, Sire, that is where they are," 
answered Robert-Houdin. "But before 
opening I beg that your majesty will note 
that the package is also sealed with the seal 
of Count Cagliostro." 



STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 

"Certainly," said the monarch, looking 
twice at the red wax with its firm impres- 
sion. "It is the same." 

And immediately the King, impatient to 
discover the contents of the packet, tore it 
open, and spread out before the spectators 
the six handkerchiefs which the conjurer 
had borrowed only a few minutes earlier. 

This is the account Robert-Houdin him- 
self gives; and it may be well to record that 
he always bore the reputation of being a 
truthful man. Nothing more extraordinary 
was ever performed by any mere conjurer; 
indeed, this feat is quite as startling as any 
of those attributed to Cagliostro himself, 
and it has the advantage of being accurately 
and precisely narrated by the inventor. Not 
only is the thing done a seeming impossi- 
bility, but it stands forth the more impres- 
sively because of the spectacular circum- 
stances of its performance — a stately pal- 
ace, a lovely garden, the assembled cour- 
tiers and the royal family. The magician 
had to depend on his wits alone, for he was 

221 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

deprived of all the advantages of his own 
theatre and of all possibility of aid from a 
confederate mingled amid the casual specta- 
tors. 

Robert-Houdin was justified in the gentle 
pride with which he told how he had thus 
astonished the King of the French. He re- 
frained from any explanation of the means 
whereby he wrought his mystery, believing 
that what is unknown is ever the more mag- 
nificent. He did no more than drop a hint 
or two, telling the reader that he had long 
possessed a cast of Cagliostro's seal, and 
suggesting slyly that when the King sent 
messengers out into the garden to stand 
guard over the orange-tree the trick was al- 
ready done, and all precautions were then 
futile. 

Yet, although the inventor«chose to keep 
his secret, any one who has mastered the 
principles of the art of magic can venture 
an explanation. Robert-Houdin has set 
forth the facts honestly ; and with the facts 
solidly established it is possible to reason 

222 



STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 

out the method employed to accomplish a 
deed which, at first sight, seems not only 
impossible but incomprehensible. 

The first point to be emphasized is that 
Robert-Houdin was as dexterous as he was 
ingenious. He was truly a prestidigitator, 
capable of any sleight-of-hand. Nothing 
was simpler for so accomplished a per- 
former than the substitution of one package 
for another, right before the eyes of all the 
spectators. And it is to be remembered 
that although the palace was the King's the 
apparatus on the extemporized stage was 
the magician's. Therefore, when he bor- 
rowed six handkerchiefs and went up on the 
stage and made them up into a package, 
which remained on a table in sight of every- 
body, we can grant without difficulty that 
the package which remained in sight did 
not then contain the borrowed handker- 
chiefs. 

In fact, we may be sure that the borrow- 
ed handkerchiefs had been conveyed some- 
how to Robert-Houdin's son, who acted as 

223 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

his assistant. When the handkerchiefs were 
once in the possession of the son out of 
sight behind the scenery or hangings of the 
stage, the father would pick up his pack of 
blank visiting-cards and distribute a dozen 
of them or a score, moving to and fro in 
very leisurely fashion, perhaps going back 
to the stage to get pencils, which he would 
also give out as slowly as possible, filling up 
the time with playful pleasantry, until he 
should again catch sight of his son. Then, 
and not until then, would he feel at liberty 
to collect the cards and take them over to 
the King. 

When the son had got possession of the 
handkerchiefs, he would smooth them 
swiftly, possibly even ironing them into 
their folds. Then he would put them into 
the parchment packet, which he would seal 
twice with Cagliostro's seal. Laying them 
in the bottom of the rusty iron casket, 
he would put on top the other parchment, 
which had already been prepared, with its 
adroit imitation of Cagliostro's handwrit- 
224 



STRANGEST FEAT OF MODERN MAGIC 

ing. Snapping down the lid of the casket, 
the lad would slip out into the corridor and 
steal into the garden, going straight to the 
box of the appointed orange-tree. He 
could do this unobserved, because no one 
was then suspecting him, and because all 
the spectators were then engaged in think- 
ing up odd places to which the handker- 
chiefs might be transported. Already, in 
the long morning, probably while the royal 
household was at its midday breakfast, the 
father or the son had loosened one of the 
staples in the back of the box in which the 
designated orange-tree was growing. The 
lad now removed this staple and thrust the 
casket into the already-prepared hole in the 
centre of the roots of the tree. Then he re- 
placed the staple at the back of the box, 
feeling certain that whoever should open 
the box in front would find the soil undis- 
turbed. This most difficult part of the task 
once accomplished, he returned to the stage, 
or at least in some way he signified to his 
father that he had accomplished his share 
225 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

of the wonder, in the performance of which 
he was not supposed to have any part. 

On seeing his son, or on receiving the sig- 
nal that his son had returned, Robert-Hou- 
din would feel himself at liberty to collect 
the cards on which various spectators had 
written the destinations they proposed for 
the package of handkerchiefs, which was 
still in full sight. He gathered up the cards 
he had distributed; but as he went toward 
the King he substituted for those written by 
the spectators others previously prepared 
by himself — a feat of sleight-of-hand quite 
within the reach of any ordinary performer. 
Of these cards, prepared by himself, he 
forced three on the sovereign; — and the 
forcing of cards upon a kindly monarch 
would present little difficulty to a presti- 
digitator of Robert-Houdin's consummate 
skill. 

When the three cards were once in the 

King's hands, the trick was done, for Rob- 

ert-Houdin knew Louis Philippe to be a 

shrewd man in small matters. Therefore, it 

226 



STRANGEST FEAT OI^ MODERN MAGIC 

was reasonably certain that when the King 
had to make a choice out of three places, 
one near and easy, a second remote and diffi- 
cult, and a third both near and difficult, 
Louis Philippe would surely select the 
third, which was conveniently at hand, and 
which seemed to be at least as impossible as 
either of the others. 

The event proved that the conjurer's 
analysis of the King's character was accu- 
rate; yet one may venture the opinion that 
the magician had taken every needed pre- 
caution to avoid failure, even if the mon- 
arch had made another selection. Proba- 
bly Robert-Houdin had one little parch- 
ment packet hidden in advance somewhere 
in the dome of the Invalides and another 
tucked up out of sight in the base of one of 
the candelabra on the chimney-piece; and if 
either of the other destinations had been 
chosen, the substitute packet would have 
been produced, and the magician would 
then have offered to transport it also into 
the box of the orange-tree. And thus the 
'227 



RECREATIONS OF AN ANTHOLOGIST 

startling climax of the marvel would have 
been only a little delayed. 

When so strange a wonder can be 
wrought under such circumstances by means 
so simple, we cannot but feel the force of 
Dr. Lodge's warning that an unwavering 
scepticism ought to be the attitude of all 
honest investigators toward every one who 
professes to be able to suspend the opera- 
tion of a custom of nature. No one of the 
feats attributed to Home, the celebrated 
medium who plied his trade in Paris during 
the Second Empire, was more abnormal 
than this trick of Robert-Houdin's, and no 
one of them is so well authenticated. It 
may be that certain of the customs of nature 
are not inexorable, and that we shall 
be able to discover exceptions now and 
again. But the proof of any alleged excep- 
tion, the evidence in favor of any alleged 
violation of the custom of nature, ought to 
be overwhelming. 

(1902). 

THE END. 

228 



AUG JU 8S04 



